


The Sound Of Falling Snow

by Dragonire



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alpha Bokuto Koutaro, Alpha Kuroo Tetsuro, Alternate Universe – Fantasy, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beta Akaashi Keiji, Corpses, Dissociation, Family Feels, Found Family, Healing, Heavy Angst, Kings & Knights, M/M, Main-ship/Endgame BokuAkaKuroTsukki, Mentioned Characters, Mentions of past miscarriages, Minor Character Death, Multi, Non-Magical Fantasy, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Not Every Character Is Tagged, Omega Tsukishima Kei, PTSD, Past Male Pregnancy, Personality Alterations Due To Plot, Polyamory, Practically Every Haikyuu Character, Pre-Story Character Deaths, Protective Akaashi Keiji, Protective Bokuto Koutaro, Protective Kuroo Tetsuro, Protective Sugawara Koushi, Recovery, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Suicide, Team Mom Sugawara Koshi, Tsukishima Kei-centric, mentions of past-rape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:41:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24524026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonire/pseuds/Dragonire
Summary: There is no more time.Tsukishima hears the moment he is seen.He can scent it in the air beneath a chorus of sharp inhales, but the boy refuses to look up when he is trying to memorise the shape of his daughter’s face; her petal lips, unaware that each breath counts down to the end. She is so small, so precious and perfect, but there is still the fear that Tsukki’s embrace might break her.The world must be terrifying; no longer encompassed by her mother’s warmth but instead the rough canvas-cloth of scratchy material and a stagnant chill, because there is no breeze in this tomb.Noise calls; Tsukki snapping back to reality. He lifted his face without thinking, turned to the lantern light that no longer blinds him, and the three strangers, swathed in armour and bearing swords, stand beyond the open door of his cell.There was no more time.Tsukki is a kidnapped omega with no memories from before the darkness, until he is saved by three strangers. There’s something about this omegan boy that draws them in. At first, they think it’s a protectiveness, as they were the ones to find him in the cellar, but over time, they begin to realise it’s something more…
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou/Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei, Pre-Story Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi, Sawamura Daichi/Sugawara Koushi
Comments: 44
Kudos: 212





	1. Metanoia

**Author's Note:**

> **Before You Read:**  
>  This story will press on seriously issues and delve into mature themes, (including _Past Rape, Suicide & Male Pregnancy_) as well as other dark themes that some people may find unpleasant and/or triggering. Darker tags will have a description in the end notes of chapters. Please note these will also contain spoilers to the story. 
> 
> I have not tagged the Rape/Non-Con warning because those events are pre-story, but those elements are discussed. 
> 
> Please take heed to tags and chapter warnings.  
> Please revise the tags when a new chapter is added.  
> Please stop reading if you no longer enjoy the story. 
> 
> Thank you. 
> 
> _~Additionally, if you feel like a warning tag is missing, then please comment so I can amend this._

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metanoia: _to turn from the darkness and face the light._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **[CONTENT FOREWARNING]**  
>  There are mature themes in this chapter that may be unpleasant and/or triggering to some people. To see the listed material, please scroll down to the end notes. Please note that these will contain spoilers to the story. Thank you.

Darkness was an eternal embrace that offered no distraction to the cold of the cellar.  
And yet, so long had they been companions in this empty, lightless world, that it was that Tsukki could no longer feel any discomfort from the cold when he sits with his back leant up against the stone wall; the only defence against the seeping chill to be his tunic and the filth of old straw that litters the floor of his cell.

Tsukki wrapped his arms tighter around the bundled cotton treasure in his arms, a gentle hum on whispered lips, listening to the way the sound of his song echoed quietly off the damp walls in replacement to the birds that could never be heard down here in the depths of stone and sorrow. 

His fingers feel like bone; stone to the touch after having fought for so long against the walls that hold him; blunted nails that bury blood in their creases, chipped and cracked with the markings of his story that are too hopeless to be worth spoken; himself too broken to offer the deserved comfort.  
But still, his movement is light and as gentle as he is able when Tsukki’s daughter squirms in his arms, the whispering of his lullaby pulled from memory once more. 

In his mind, Tsukki envisions a siren. His voice, never to be so beautiful, can only hope to convey the calling she would sing; the mesmerising beauty that, in stories, had so often led men to their dooms, upon rocks that hunger for blood; the desire for her beauty far more than the fear of death.  
It is this comfort Tsukki wishes to give; the fearlessness of knowing and courage to face it in peace regardless.  
He wishes the same for himself, and yet even as his song rings for a hundred heartbeats, both his and his daughter’s, Tsukki cannot feel no greater emotion than want for which he can’t conjure. 

_It is the darkness,_ the boy thinks bleakly, lifting his eyes and letting his head lean back into the cold touch of stone. Around him, his world is monochrome; solitary in black and grey and only the faintest touches of pale yellow that comes from beyond his barred cell where the stone bricks of the cellar have begun to shift overtime, and the faintest slithers of light creep between them and the creaking timber beams that hold up the ceiling.  
And while colour may be faint, noise is not, when Tsukki holds his song and lets the world around him draw its breath.  
He can hear the sounds of the other omegas in their cells; hear the peace they had found in a moment of sleep before the sun will rise and steal away their dreams. Tsukki has sung for them, sung for Mari too, when he could no longer hold back the fear in his chest but sought something more than tears and the frustration of blunted nails that could never turn stone. 

So long had been spent in the darkness, and yet still there were days when Tsukki dreamed of freedom.  
So many before him had already given up, casting their souls into the sky with their dreams, becoming nothing more than mindless shells that accepted what they were given, and let be taken what wanted to be taken. Mari, an omega just like him, was much the same, and while they did not fight their tormentors in fear of retaliation, neither had given up their dreams of blue skies; of open fields that stretched for miles and miles; for winding streams that touched both mountain peak and ocean depths. 

Tsukki’s song lifts once more, his daughter’s gurgling to be heard as he paints her sunrises richer than the pale yellow of lantern light that slips between the floorboards. 

The dream shattered beneath the clanking of a key being turned in a lock. 

Tsukki’s voice stutters in his throat as his movements become instinctive; body turning away from his cell door and the dawning light that pours in through the opening, painting the cellar stones into pyrite bricks.  
He holds his daughter tighter, turning into the corner of his cell to hide her before she can be seen, his eyes clamping shut as if that would bring him protection from those that invade the constructed peace hidden away in the dark. 

Something ugly and foul coils in Tsukki’s chest, his scent growing cold at the sudden realisation that his back is what faces his cell door, and hunched like this, he will not be able to see those that approach.  
And yet despite the want for his own safety, there is no battle to be fought when it is his child who he protects. All he has is his body to place between his daughter and those that would seek to harm her. 

She is not even a day old; born to him in the silence of this dirty cell, so fragile and so delicate. Tsukki still feels the aching pain he had endured in the late hours; no one to witness his pain or the gift of life when she was brought into this world with a cry like crystalline glass.  
He had nothing to offer her but the warmth of his skin and the musty straw-dusted pillow case that he had wrapped around her small body, having used his own tunic to wipe her dry. There is no bed, no cradle that he could set her in but the embrace of his own arms, having held her close to treasure the precious moments that he has been given with her until the time came that his keepers realised that he had finally given birth and she would be taken from him. 

It seems that that time is now, so soon since his happiness that Tsukki has not had a chance to bestow upon her a name. 

They come with heavy steps and amusement in their throats; scents rotten with violent malice and edged with an urgency that sparks fear more than the gravel of their voices. Around him, Tsukki can hear the others wake from their dreamless sleep; the sound of straw and feet and the clanging laughter of a cell door being opened beneath the disgusted complaints of the two men that cannot stand the stench of the cellar.  
That is to be expected, the boy thinks, that of course they’ll stink of sweat and rat piss when they’re all kept in tiny cells. When they were only given a small ration of water, none of the omegas saw reason to waste it on bathing.  
On rare occasions, one of them might be taken from their cells and dragged above ground to where sunlight would stab like needles; where open windows would tease them the touch of a breeze and they would be given the luxury of a decent bath in preparation to meet an alpha that had visited while carrying enough wealth to pay for a bed and a clean omega. 

Most patrons were drunkards who didn’t care about who they fucked. Or where.  
Most of them were too poor to afford a clean omega. 

Maybe that is the reason why the keepers have come so early; to fetch a soul for the pyre in preparation for a visiting party.  
It isn’t something unheard of that Donyuko, the Master, will host benefactors with a feast of food and bodies, and Tsukki takes comfort in the protection given to him from his unsightly body that still bulges despite the angel he cradles in his arms. 

The suddenness of rust bleeds into the darkness in chorus to a bubbled cry. 

Tsukki’s head snaps up instantly, his body tense in abrupt fear as the scents of the keepers draws around him; the welling panic of his own sun-burnt wheat, of bramble-thorn pain scratching against his skin.  
Another cell door is wrenched open and this time there is a voice, begging. Tsukki can taste their fear like ash in his mouth. He can hear the tears caught in their throat, the begging that is choked beneath the bubbling of blood in the moment their throat is slit. 

They’re… _killing them._

Tsukki cannot understand the slaughter; he cannot fathom a reason for it as those around him smell of fear as thick as the darkness. Some scream for mercy when faced with the blade, some finally finding their souls once more to fight back when the keepers come with a dagger with a taste for omegan flesh. It cannot be turned by pleading.  
Instead, Tsukki can scent their amusement mounting, the pitiful attempts of retaliation from the chained omegas enough to bring a sense of sport to this mindless hunt, and all at once the darkness is shattered int a torrent of screams and tears and blood.  
_“No,”_ they sob, having learnt long ago that begging would not save them from being taken by an alpha’s rut, and yet it is desperation that fills them with the desire to be free once more; finding more fear in the cut of a knife that will bury them in stone and this darkness forever. 

“No, no, _no! Please— no!”_

All of them, ignored. 

“Get a load of this,” one keeper laughs. “Cold as cat’s piss,” says the other with a smirk so clear in his voice that Tsukki can hear it like rocks scraping across his skin. “Must’ve done it through the night or we would’ve heard them all wailing like kittens.”  
His voice is so close that Tsukki does not think when he curls his arms tighter around his daughter, eyes scrunched tight in defence to the panic and tears that choke him as much as the ocean of fear that floods the cellar; the taunting remarks like an echo of Death’s footsteps as she follows behind the keepers, waiting for her turn to bestow the kiss of eternal freedom. 

But it is not Death’s freedom that Tsukki seeks. 

In his arms, his daughter begins to squirm.  
Not even a day old and yet she is sensitive to her mother’s scent; needle sharp and as cold as the middle of winter; colourless in panic and pain; too much against her petal-soft skin that she cannot help but beg for release in the only way she knows how.  
By crying. 

“What was that?” 

Tsukki hurries to shush her, but with his own growing panic it is like a double edge blade that bleeds them both when the boy hums wordlessly, begging for the siren’s calm and his own scent to soften and warm in its embrace around her. “Sssh, sssh, it’s going to be okay,” he promises in feathered whispers, his arms cradling around the angel in his embrace even as she opens her mouth to cry again.  
A small, dainty hand reaches for his own from the folds of the filthy cotton; Tsukki quick to extend a finger of bone for her to hold onto, not knowing the words to offer or the touch of his scent that can be given to lull her into peace. His siren song has been stolen by fear, his painted dreams replace by a fevered need to abandon this darkness and race the never-ending fields with his daughter in his arms. 

Eternal night and Death’s freedom are all that await him here.  
Even if his body was not weakened by the pain endured to bring his daughter into this world, Tsukki knows that he wouldn’t be able to win even if he fought against them.  
Even if he is not chained; even if the only restraints are the metal collar around his neck and the locked door that is soon to be opened by those that have come to kill him, Tsukki cannot see beyond the falling knife. 

He cannot get away.

Did Mari get away?  
Tsukki had not heard her pleas or the scent of her snow-sharp fear, acrid and sickly that had so often been reflected in his own, and yet now there is the only embracing black of guilt because Tsukki doesn’t have the strength to defend his daughter, not even the strength to raise is voice and warn Mari to run, to escape, to leave this place and never look back. 

Sobs break the melody of his hushing, tremors tracing throughout his body that are reflected in his daughter’s voice; her own distress beginning to rise and it is all Tsukki can do to hold back his tears and rock her.  
He wishes that he could have done more for her; to give her more than this dark cellar and an unknown future in the cruel hands of those that would come to steal with the greed that will pluck stars from the night sky and hide them away from seeing eyes; with the malice of amusement, smile blooming beneath the petals of another’s blood. 

Just once he wishes that he could have seen the sun upon her face; to see laughter in her eyes when the sky shattered into lightning storms that do not chase, but are chased instead as she twirls and dances beneath the pattering rain; wearing mud as armour on her skin; a goddess of beauty and kindness that deserves so much more than the dark world she was born into. 

And here, at the end, Tsukishima wishes that, just once, Tadashi could’ve met their daughter. 

Heavy footfalls halt outside the cell door; a sudden illumination of pale lantern light blinding when it has been so long since Tsukki had seen a naked flame so close; the feeling of its heat licking his body like a curse in world of pyrite stone and winter cold.  
Their laughter is cruel and mocking as it has been in the face of the omegas before, but their words are sharp enough on Tsukki’s skin that he turns his face. “Is this the pregnant one?” asks the taller, lifting his lantern higher in inspection to the boy, his scent cold and curious in a way that turns Tsukki’s stomach.  
Turns it again when they call him _“Donyuko’s.”_

He cowers in the corner of his cell, his daughter’s face hidden behind tears and all he can breathe is fear, desperation enticing fear: such a tremendous rift between the emotions he felt now in Death’s gaze when only hours before Tsukki had been enraptured in the joys of giving life.  
And he would give his life, if it meant his daughter’s freedom. 

Their laughter rings dark beneath the bubbling of his tears, her features fracturing like rippling water, and it is in the movement of him smearing sweat, tears and exhaustion that they see. 

“The bitch has given birth.”  
Their amusement drips red. 

“If the kid’s alive, then at least there will be one good thing to come out of this mess.” 

The door opens without ceremony, the shorter barging his way into the small kennel space with his dagger angled down; Tsukki startled even when he knew it was coming, his back thrown against the cold stone wall, arms pulling his daughter closer as she bleats sadness in his arms.  
“No, no, _no! Please, no,”_ he begs, just as those that have come before, knowing deep down his words to be useless but saying them anyway because he cannot sit back and do nothing when they threaten to take the only treasure he has left. 

“Don’t touch her!” 

He can feel a war within himself; feel they way that his mind whispers softly; that it will be all okay as long as he holds his tongue, as long as he submits to their cruelty; that once they had taken what they wanted, they would have no further reason to hurt him.  
But the dagger isn’t meant for pain and Tsukki’s panic rears up like ocean waves; white-foam horses with thundering hooves that charge the cliffs as they have a thousand times and will a thousand more, wanting to return to the mountain peak that stands atop the world; crowned in golden sunlight and so far from the tempest of fear that drowns them in this cellar; drowns his lungs in a scream of siren song. 

_“Don’t touch her!”_

“Bitch,” the shorter snarls, his scent as sharp as his knife, dripping-crimson with the blood of his victims with no desire to cleanse it. It is copper and rust; the beta’s scent potent enough to be mud between his bared teeth, the hiss of anger that demands the keeper not cross the threshold of Tsukki’s cold-stone tranquillity.  
It is a thought that he pushes into his scent, pushing his wavering strength into the only blade he wields. 

_“I won’t let you touch her!”_

Tsukishima may have been born an omega – a stain upon the society of stronger thrall, nothing more than a slave to bind to his better’s will – but here in the darkness he had found strength when he opened his heart and peace fountained forth from his soul, when it was _his_ will for those around him to be lulled into calm.  
In the darkness, Tsukki had learnt that with the influence of his scent alone, he had the strength to calm those that came to steal what pride remained. Under his touch, under the gentleness of induced heat, he would make it so that there was no pain, no rut and no bite.  
He would never turn them away completely – to destroy their want to ravage him – when he knew that if it was him then it would be another; laid waiting on a bed of straw with a mind frayed from violence they could not turn as Tsukki had learnt for the sake of constructed peace. 

With his daughter in danger, there is no peace. 

Tsukki fashioned himself a weapon from bone and fire; oak branches and twine having ever been ready for the strike of a match and set his frustration a flame. He burns the air with his fear, his pain, his demand that they turn from his gravestone and leave him to his darkness; to not steal the sunflower-golden sunshine that is all his own.  
Tsukki’s sound is wordless, his power pushed into his scent, pulling it from rock-scraped bone; from creaking floorboards and filtering light to the gentle touches of warmed water that pooled his mind and set the weave of his thoughts unspun as he lay on cushioned pillows, legs apart and waiting. 

Panic may choke his flames, but it is not entirely his own. 

The man, with his brimstone anger and blood-soaked scent, has not taken a step.  
But it isn’t because Tsukki commands him not to, and when he lifts his face, through frightened tears he can see that the taller keeper has a hold of his arm. 

In the light of the lantern, Tsukki can see his brow glistening with sweat, his jaw clenched to hold noise and words as his pheromones war with Tsukki’s will and his own; orders from a man who is master alike to the pair, in battle to the omega’s fear. He is an alpha, and while the blood in his veins will bleed blue when cut, he is as much animalistic in nature when faced with an omega’s pheromones.  
Pheromones that exude fear towards the beta, a longing for protection and the scent of the alpha himself, as if there was a bond already between them. 

“Sunada, what—?”  
_“Help me,”_ Tsukki pleads, letting his voice fill with emotion.  
He cannot keep them at bay forever, cannot keep the wolf howling when he has been starved too long of a fight worth chipping its claws, dulling its fangs on rotten mean. Everything is rotten here in the dark, but there has been peace in solitude and if Tsukki cannot have freedom he will have what calm he has claimed to be all his own. 

The second man is an alpha; so much more susceptible to his scent than the beta, and it is with this knowledge, this flickering flame of hope, that Tsukki leans into his slate-grey pain: rough cellar bricks against his skin; the raw of blisters beneath the metal that has chafed his neck since the first day of darkness; an encompassing feeling that he cannot breathe welling up into his scent, so strong, so… _real,_ that in his arms, his daughter lets out a wailing cry in distress for her mother.  
And the alpha, driven by the need to protect this pretend mate and baby, drags the beta from the cell with thunder warming his throat.

“Sunada stop!”  
“He’s going to kill me,” Tsukki whispers, no longer shying away from the horror that floods his voice like a storm at sea, fighting the instinct that demands he calm the alpha as he had so often before when money exchange hands and Tsukki was taught to lead an aggravated alpha to release, or please them in any which way they desired. 

She cries once more, whimpering, and Tsukki’s heart breaks at the sound of her tears; tracing the lines of her face by the light of the lantern that swings precariously between the two that shout with rising tempers where the alpha tries to explain himself to the other keeper; tries to break the grip he has but there is no use when instinct and logic war within him under the influence of pretend. 

In their scuffle, the lantern is knocked from his grasp, and the cellar was cast into night once more. 

Noise fills the void the light had faded; swears and curses whipped up into a torrent of shouting, feet scuffing the damp stone, the sound of bodies colliding and the echoing clang of a cell door that bounces back off the stone wall from where it had been kicked. 

And yet through the shock of the snuffed candle, beyond the hope of blue skies and gold-wheat fields that lay on the other side of the open cell door there is noise that does not belong to the keepers. Shouting pounds the quiet with rageful echoes; feet on creaking wooden stairs that sets Tsukki’s panic aflame once more, staring at the door cast wide and the freedom, his for the taking if he was strong enough. 

_Run._

The arrival of more guards was a distraction unforeseen, and in that moment Tsukki’s grip wavered on the pretend.  
The alpha snarled his frustration, the beta’s dagger flashing in the dark. Yelling can be heard from above; words undiscernible under Tsukki’s panicked breath as Death smiles from the darkness, waiting her turn to bestow a kiss. 

But the keepers don’t face the omega. Instead, they turn back down the corridor between the cells; snarls quick and bitten, anger as sharp as a whip, and suddenly they’re out of sight, yelling and growling like animals to the unseen intruders. 

All Tsukki can see is the open door. 

_Run._

Like a beckoning wind, the pull of freedom calls to him; siren-sweet; the touch of a mother’s love against his frayed heart that has so long hoped for a chance like this, but in the face of a dream at the tips of reaching fingers, Tsukki cannot find the strength to force himself to his feet.  
Not when he is choked by the alpha’s anger that grows beyond his sight; clashing against another’s like swords that meet on the battlefield. 

The stone bricks do nothing to absorb the anger; only amplifying it and the voices that spew dragon fire in challenge to one another; echoed in heavy boots that stamp the ceiling, glass smashing, commands echoed up that is staggeringly foreign to the drunk merriment of an illegal brothel on the edge of a forgotten lawless town. 

It as if a war has descended, and beneath the bloodshed Tsukki cannot run from, he turns into the cornered darkness, hushing over and over, blocking out the sounds of the thunder around him as he focuses on calming his daughter. She still cries, but the sound has softened now that her mother rocks the two of them, arms curled tight and protective, tucking the pink of her skin behind scratchy cloth as if it was a suit of armour. 

_Just one moment under the sun,_ he finds himself praying as tears trace hollow cheeks.  
_Just one chance to hear the chorus of birds._

_Just one smile._

“Get off me—”  
“You’re about an inch away from being run through by my sword. Why don’t you keep on talking and let’s see where that gets you?”

The voice is whip-sharp and teasing, edged with an electric anger the sparks beneath the scent of an alpha; unfamiliar, but just as terrifying as all those that have come before. Tsukki clamps a hand over his mouth to stifle his breathing, arm curling tighter around his daughter as they lean into the dark. He doesn’t understand the reason for their fight, or why the two that had come to slaughter the omegas are now coloured with pain and… _fear._

“Kuroo, calm down,” says another voice, softer in comparison, but Tsukki can still hear his rage like the rumbling of distant thunder on the horizon.  
“Bo, you too. There’s nothing to be done.”

There are three strangers in the cellar. Enemies to the keepers if their fear is clue enough.  
Once, Tsukki may have entertained the thought those that are enemy to his may be friend, but so long in the dark had taken Tsukki’s ability to trust so easily. He could hope, but hope has no ground and it is ignored when Tsukki seeks answers and recognises the inherent nature of the intruders: Alpha. Beta.  
_Not to be trusted._

“They’re warm,” one alpha says, his distress akin to Tsukki’s daughter; prevalent in his voice in a keening whine as he moves about the cellar; the sound of gentle footsteps and the gliding of material the only clues Tsukki has to their movements when he holds his breath and listens. 

“All of them… They’re all dead. Keiji, they’re still _warm._ They’ve only just been killed. If we had been faster, if we had—”  
“Bo. Don’t do this to yourself. You can’t blame yourself for any of this.”  
The beta speaks soft, ignoring his own brontide-anger in favour of calming his companions who are just as susceptible to their own emotions as they are to the lingering scent of fear and panic that permeated the shadows. 

The first alpha – who had threatened the keepers into silence – makes his own muttered observations of the cellar and the still-bleeding bodies of omegas as he moves around the room to light lanterns and beat back the gloom. He tells another to take the keepers upstairs, words clipped and short in ode to his anger; his leather-pressed footsteps skirting the stone in a countdown to Tsukki being discovered.  
He holds his breath and wills his scent to vanish; to sever the trail that would lead them to his cell.  
The child in his arms holds his finger and doesn’t make a sound. 

_Run._

_The door is open._

_If we’re fast enough, we can escape from here._

The footsteps draw closer.  
Tsukki presses himself into the stone, imagining his scent to be that of the damp; to mix with the rancid stench of sweat and rat and unidentifiable muck as not draw them closer. He wore rust like tears, breathed death and rotting bones to deter them from exploring the dark.  
But the steps still echo and Tsukki has nowhere to run, unless he wants to rush into their waiting arms. 

Dragon-fire rage spilt into the open air – Tsukki unable to catch his breath in the suddenness of it, arms curling around his daughter to calm her before he could make a sound. Fresh tears sprung to his eyes as his throat burned on the taste of anger as the second alpha crumbled into fury; volcanic and volatile as he rages at something found.  
Tsukki didn’t know what could anger him beyond this mindless massacre, but he didn’t want to know. 

This time, both his companions worked to calm him despite their own broiling emotions.  
They speak to him softly, their words and their scents curling throughout the shadows like a giant’s final exhale; all of it foreign and confusing to Tsukki who had only known the ferocity and starving lust of an alpha in rut that sought release, be it through giving pain or taking pleasure. 

_The door is open._

_If we’re fast enough, we can run._

“Can you… hear that?” 

_If we’re fast enough…_

There is no more time. Death waits beyond the threshold.  
There is no more song to sing, no more dream to paint in the quiet of the cell.  
Tsukki buries himself into the act of admiring his daughter’s face. She is resting now, not quite asleep, but the exhaustion of fear is too much for her tiny, fragile body, and she curls into his bundled embrace with closed eyes and pink cheeks. 

Here, Tsukki watched her and, enamoured of her perfection, bore one more prayer: That when Death comes to give her kiss, she will spare another to the child’s brow, so that they might leave this darkness together. 

Tsukishima hears the moment he is seen.  
He can scent it in the air beneath a chorus of sharp inhales, but the boy refuses to look up when he is trying to memorise the shape of his daughter’s face; her petal lips slightly parted, unaware that each breath counts down to the end. She is so small, so precious and perfect, but there is still the fear that Tsukki’s embrace might break her.  
The world must be terrifying; no longer encompassed by her mother’s warmth but instead the rough canvas-cloth of scratchy material and a stagnant chill, because there is no breeze in this tomb. 

A dark thought lances through his peace; a dark, horrible thought that he should’ve never given birth to her in the first place. That he should’ve tried to disrupt the pregnancy; he should’ve riled up one of the drunk patrons, fought back until they begun to beat him—  
But Tsukki knew it would have been impossible. 

Even if it saved her from this pain, even if it saved her from a pointless death before she could ever set eyes upon the sun, Tsukki could have never done something so cruel to his daughter, who meant the world to him. 

His daughter.  
The only piece of Tadashi that he has left. 

Noise calls; Tsukki snapping back to reality. He lifted his face without thinking, turned to the lantern light that no longer blinds him, and the three strangers, swathed in armour and bearing swords, stand beyond the open door of his cell. 

_There was no more time._

The tallest one is the first to move.  
His hair is nested; raven-black and unkempt in a way that suggests it had been thrown about by the wind. His fringe is in a battle with itself, half pushed back, the rest wilting to hide parts of his face in a way that doesn’t suggest deliberance, but laziness against a fight so often lost that he has given up trying.  
He watches Tsukki with an intensity in his eyes so contrasting to the limp of his body; to the way his shoulders droop; the way he pulled his arms in, knees bent as if to make himself look smaller. Less threatening.  
Distantly, Tsukki wonders why the alpha should care. Why does the man act the way he does, when all it will take is a simple swing of his sword to cut Tsukki’s thread of fate and release him to the stars. 

_Make it quick,_ he prays, holding tight to his daughter, instead of wiping the tears that mosaic Death’s deliverance. 

Beside him, the other alpha watches on in communal shock. His own gaze is just as intense, but there is something less calculative, more feeling. He is white like mountain slopes; slate-stone and strong, but under Tsukki’s gaze he… _isn’t._  
He is still firm and a mountain of strength that holds his head high, but there is something in the way he stands, needing a firm touch to the beta, as if he was holding onto an anchor to stop himself from falling apart.  
His scent, rugged and stony, is a complex weave of emotions, all swirling inside his chest where he holds himself together and holds himself back.  
The alpha is as much the mountain as he is the tremoring earth that shakes its roots and threatens to topple stacked boulders into dust. 

Yet the most frightening is the quietest of them all. 

Betas don’t crave heat like alphas do, but that doesn’t mean Tsukki has escaped their wrath. There is a selfishness in those that have come to him; chosen him above others because of his height and his so-called beauty; their hands heavy, their fists like metal, fingers choking with the desperate need to destroy, all because they cannot bend an omega’s will like an alpha can.  
Jealousy is an ember that burns long after the fire has died. It is a knife that bleeds more than blood and Tsukki is _afraid._

This beta does not show his jealousy. He is calm, even in the face of such a disgusting sight; but his scent betrays him to his hidden revulsion.  
There is control in his movements and a curiosity that holds Tsukki in his gaze like a specimen to be analysed before being discarded without another thought, and it is this coldness that drives fear through Tsukki’s body, like an arrow through painted wood.

Intuition lights the betas eyes in liquid silver, reflecting thoughts that he does not voice; emotions that flick so quickly in his scent that Tsukki hasn’t a chance to name them before they are replaced by something blue, something red, something violet sky. 

He is the sharp of a surgeon’s knife; precise and surgical in his movements, no act wasted when he reaches with a hand to press his fingers to the white-alpha’s nape; a gentle brush of his scent lifting enough to be recognised, taken by the two that protect him with their bodies, staring with wide, wary eyes, as if _Tsukki_ was the threat, and not the one being threatened. 

The raven-alpha takes a slow step, crossing into the realm of Tsukki’s sanctuary. 

And even though the boy had thought himself prepared for death; had hoped for peace and accepted he had done all he could— had fought back, when his back was pressed to the wall, he had fought back against the keepers despite his fear but _it wasn’t enough—_  
He is still terrified. For himself. For his daughter. It is instinct that he draws himself in; his child still hidden between the folds of wrapped cloth, held tight in shaking arms that _could not protect—_

The alpha stops. 

His face is drawn in pain, sadness the colour of his scent. They all share this emotion – the alphas, enduring; the beta, distantly – but it is the man with pale skin and snow-bright hair streaked with ash that feels it the most intensely.  
His pain is not just worn on his face, but felt in his heart, as if he can look into Tsukki’s eyes and see every hardship he has faced; heard every scream, watched every tear trace lines down his cheeks when the alphas stole his family away from him; when they threw broken bodies to the stone as a reminder to what could happen if they disobeyed.  
What _would_ happen if they disobeyed. 

His scent is heartbreak and shattered sunrises; an emotion familiar and yet altogether mystifying that Tsukki breathes it in like oxygen. He surrounds its likeness around himself – pulls the monochrome of sympathy into his own scent, to wear it like a cloak and smother his fear with something new.  
It is neither warm nor cold, but the touch of it reminds him of snow in the air; flurries of ice like cherry blossoms and just as beautiful. 

Slowly, _slowly,_ the raven-alpha sinks to a knee. 

He doesn’t spare a thought for his armour – for the soft-spun tunic of his clothes that would be dirtied by the muck of the cellar floor – and speaks instead with a feathered tongue.  
“My name is Kuroo Tetsuro. This is Akaashi Keiji and Bokuto Koutaro,” he says, gesturing to each in turn. They nod their heads to their names, none of them breaking their gaze as Tsukki’s passes between the three of them. He holds the mirror of Bokuto’s cape of snow around himself; hiding his daughter from their noses and their eyes, his mind tumbling over the gentleness they have given him. 

Where was their anger? Where was their disgust?  
Where was their hatred for an omega like him?

The raven-alpha— Kuroo, is watching him. Not just watching, but _seeing._  
His eyes are as sharp as sunlight, but they are soft in regard and Tsukki threads his fingers through the numb of Bokuto’s mirrored scent because he does not understand. Anger, hate, he knows. He knows how much a blade will hurt him; familiar to the cold the comes when too much blood is spilt. He knows the weight of a fist and that the bruises that remain, while painful, do not last. 

But this gentleness is a monster that hides its teeth and Tsukki should be _afraid._

“What’s your name?” 

Tsukki blinked away the last of his lingering tears. With the snow-alpha’s scent to numb him, his curiosity ripples amongst fear. It is not abandoned, but neither does it stain the forefront of his mind where questions bloom like snowdrops in the thaw, but there is no flower with red petals of strength, and when he opens his mouth to answer Kuroo’s question, Tsukki cannot even push out air. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Kuroo says, still soft.  
With one knee on the cold stone, he edges a little more into the cell, hands raised in effort to calm the omega’s shaking; slight tremors that run the length of his body, but none at fault from the cold stone pressed into his skin or the exhaustion the wraps tight around his head.  
Kuroo continues to speak softly, his assurance echoed in his scent; summer warmth that brushes velvet against Tsukki’s cheek and it is so much like how Tadashi used to touch him that he longs to bridge the distance—

 _Alpha,_ his mind reminds him in warning.  
But the more that Tsukki watches, the more he finds a void between what he had come to expect and what he is given from those that face him. 

Kuroo is cautious, but for Tsukki’s sake instead of his own. His movements are slow, silk-like and fluid to spin the colours of a story without words. Behind Kuroo, Akaashi and Bokuto share touches; grounding when the white-alpha wants for something but is anchored by the beta who should be the one under _his_ command, and not the other way around.  
They have all done well to hide their earlier anger, and while Tsukki won’t so easily forget, he can’t help but wonder if he had misunderstood their reasons. He isn’t sure if they are unlike those that have so often kept his company, and yet they show him how dissimilar they are; caring instead of selfish, loving instead of indifferent. 

Tsukki’s confusion must show on his face – it is not in his scent because he still wears the disguise of his snow-white cape; a shield for himself and his daughter – and Kuroo replies with a gentle smile. 

_Gentle._  
When had an alpha ever been gentle? 

“There’s no need to be frightened anymore,” Kuroo says, still moving closer. He is almost close enough to touch, and Tsukki can’t help but wonder if this peace is nothing but a dream, that he will wake to the darkness any minute now; his daughter, taken; expected to spread his legs for another alpha, over and over, over and _over—_

“We are knights of the King’s Guilds. You are safe with us.”

King’s Guild. 

Donyuko. 

_They were just like Donyuko._

Fear struck Tsukishima like lightning. He shook his head, fresh tears shed like hot wax. His breath caught in his throat, his strength to fight back, wavering, because they had lured him into hope and he had been foolish enough to begin lowering his walls—

“Sssh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” the raven-alpha lied, scenting the air as he spoke; bonfire gold and sunlit water that trickles like a forest stream, not unlike those that Tsukki has painted in the dark, when he took the chance to dream.  
Opposite, Bokuto’s snow melts away into wanting; sickening, even without the lust that would colour the omega’s skin in bruising flowers with thorns that prick and scratch and bleed. 

The suddenness of Kuroo’s words stole Tsukki’s cloak from him also, and there is no defence but that of his own body. He knew there was no safety in the company of Guild Knights.  
_They were the ones who had trapped him here._

The bonfire burns Tsukki’s skin. 

The thorns grew in his veins and flowers bloomed in his lungs. 

The water was poison to his lips, all of it suffocating even when the omega draws back, unable to retreat anymore when stone surrounds him and holds fast. He knows he cannot flee, knows his nails cannot turn the bricks. So many times before has he scraped skin to bone in his effort to dig past its mettle and crush it into dust; to open up the darkness into soil that can be dug with desperate hands and Tsukki would finally claw his way out of this tomb—

“No, _no!”_ the boy sobs, reaching with his soul for the blanket of snow and only finding false sympathy that hurts as much as blistered fingers that are too weak to fight back with. 

He had barely been able to hold back one alpha.  
What hope does he have against _two?_

“Kuroo, Bokuto, move back. Give him some space.” 

It is the beta who takes charge – a thought jarring enough to knock Tsukki from his swelling panic, although it was nothing in comparison to the realisation that the two alphas _obeyed him._  
They have stepped back into the corridor; the beta now the one on his knees, palms held up and face impassively blank. He doesn’t share his scent, and neither do the alphas when he instructed them to draw back.

Akaashi holds the same calculative gaze that Kuroo had first regarded him (before the lies and falsity), but there is something far colder in his silver eyes. They allude to detachment, mirrored so easily in his scent, but while he does not share the cold cloak that Tsukki had fashioned, there was something in the way his eyes drank in the omega like a man starved for air that set the boy’s teeth on edge. 

Ever since he had first woken to the dark, Tsukki forced himself to learn quick; to read those around him to learn who he could trust and who he couldn’t; to recognise those that didn’t care for him and those that would hurt him. He had learnt to understand what others wanted so that he would be able to calm them.  
And while betas were not inherently attuned to scents as an alpha or omega, they still shared their emotions in the same way happiness would pull a smile onto their face. They could still detect pheromones. They were still affected.  
No matter how slightly, Tsukki could still influence him. 

But before the omega can find the strength, or unravel the puzzle of the Guild Knight crouched before him, Akaashi turns his gaze to the touch of pain that begins to swell beyond the cage.

Bokuto hands curled into shaking fists, his nails close to drawing blood as much as his teeth where he clenches his jaw and scrapes fang to bone. His eyes burn bright in a rage as deep as his heartbreak. His breath comes quick and sharp; staccato and far from the rhythm of his heaving lungs that it looks like he is suffocating.  
The panting doesn’t choke the flames but stoke them; the look in the alpha’s eyes animalistic and wanting. 

_Was he going into a rut?_

“Bo, we’re okay down here. Kuroo and I can handle this. I need you to go and report to Daichi what we’ve found.”  
Their first focus is to calm him – sharing their own scent as Tsukki pulls back, watching, hoping to learn more in the few seconds he has been given. It won’t be long until they notice his daughter, but when they do, they will take her and Tsukki will have _nothing—_

“Kou, _calm down.”_

There is a command in Akaashi’s voice and power in his scent; as strong as the stone walls that bury Tsukki here, but sun-warmed and smooth to the touch. No worry to edge it with storm clouds.  
But then, why should there be worry when there is a warm-blooded omega ready to lay in front of them.  
Bokuto will take, because that is his nature. And Tsukki will be taken, because that is his worth.

This familiarity is reassuring to Tsukki – he understands what will come next more than the threat of death and he can feel himself splinter; feel the way his mind wraps around itself like a pup curled in the nest, the rest of him melting into honey; rich and intoxicating and inviting. He pulls an ocean to surround himself; sets his mind adrift in its depths while his body floats on the surface, for the alpha to take what he wanted while Tsukki floated, safe in his artic sea of nothingness.  
He could endure, as long as he remained in this void. 

“Kou, listen to me. Focus on me.”

Anger still burns, but it cannot touch Tsukki as he waits, grounded only by the damp stone beneath his legs, still bare and bloody from where he had given birth—

“Bokuto. Upstairs. _Now.”_

Beyond the ice of his scent, Tsukki watches his world crumble. He had thought he knew what would happen; had expected Bokuto to take what was so easily offered; that Kuroo would fight him for a taste first and when they were finished then the beta would prove that he was just as strong. Just as cruel. 

Beyond the ice, Kuroo’s hand that had been steadied on Bokuto’s arm turns into a shove.  
But it isn’t a fight, when he is following the motion with his own body, words fountaining from his mouth in a rushed spiel as the white-alpha takes shelter behind the rock wall, vanishing from sight as he chases the flickering lantern light, footsteps like drums of war beating on the wooden staircase, the lightning clap of the cellar door kicked wide, swinging heavy on its hinges, banging against the outer wall to invite a steady hum of voices from the world above…. 

Tsukki stares.  
He doesn’t… that wasn’t… 

_What?_

He had felt Bokuto’s growing anger. He can still taste it, like ash on his tongue; feel the graze of his disgust, of all of their disgust like poison in his mouth, smothering, suffocating—

_What use was Tsukki, an omega, if an alpha rejected him?_  
_What use was he as an omega if he couldn’t entice…?_

Is that why the keepers wanted to kill him? 

“Hey, hey, It’s okay. You’re safe. They won’t touch you.”

The beta is calling to him, his voice as gentle as it had been when he spoke to his companion and it’s all just so _confusing,_ because they were alpha and beta, they weren’t meant to care about him. Don’t they know he’s an omega?  
_Of course they do._

So why are they treating him with compassion? Why does Akaashi, with his piercing silver eyes and barely hidden disgust, press closer, repeating his words as if Tsukki would believe them if they’re repeated enough.  
Akaashi doesn’t give hate, or anger, and _yes,_ he may feel disgust like a chill upon his skin, but he gives none of it to Tsukki and—why, why, _why?_

There’s noise. Voices, atop the stairs.  
Kuroo is quick to hush the newcomers, quietening them before their clamouring can become too loud, but his movements were fast and sudden, Tsukki shifting backwards because he was surprised, but his head knocks against unmoving stone.  
In his arms, his daughter squirms. 

“It’s okay,” Akaashi says, and there’s something in his voice that is desperate and painful. “It’s okay, it’s Bokuto and some friends. They won’t come near you if you don’t want him to. None of us will.”  
With that, the man draws back, still slow, still watching Tsukki, but there is a touch of relief shared between them when Tsukki can take a breath and it doesn’t feel like there is a mountain sitting on his chest. 

The voices, unfamiliar, talk hurried and quiet. Tsukki can hear Kuroo estimating numbers, and even from here he can scent the man’s pain as if it’s hard to talk about moving bodies, “but it’s not just the dozen omega that have been murdered because there’s another and he’s—”

_Mari._

The keepers had come to the cellar, and Tsukki had thought they were simply fetching an omega to be cleaned in preparation to welcome Donyuko or one of his wealthier patrons, and instead they had come with a dagger that favoured omegan blood, and scornful laughter when they threatened to take his daughter away from him.  
But through it all, Tsukki hadn’t felt Mari’s fear. He hadn’t heard her pleas or snow-sharp terror that was as familiar as his own; acrid and sickly. 

Hate, born and bled from his own heart, pricks inwards and Tsukki, desperate to know that the younger girl is safe, forces his tired body to move. He ignores the way the stone scrapes his skin, the feeling of dried blood flaking between his legs, the flea bites that itch from the dirty straw as he forces himself to his feet, ignoring the way that Akaashi rises with him, telling him to slow down, that “it’s okay, take it slow, you’re hurt, you’re bleeding, just take it—”  
“Where’s Mari?” 

Mari’s cell was closer to the wooden stairs, far enough that when they would talk, late into the night, Tsukki would have to press up close to his cell door just to see far enough down the corridor to where he would catch a glimpse of her smile, her soft silver hair that shone as if blessed by the moon. 

Akaashi stands in his path; eyes wide, scent dripping in ice-white panic and Tsukki might feel fear if he wasn’t already terrified – if he hadn’t already threw himself into the emotion of worry for the young omega who he had cared for like a sister, loved as if she was his own family – and somewhere in the back of his mind he knows that the beta can see the tight bundle of cotton he holds protectively to his chest, but all Tsukki can think is that the keepers had come to the cellar to kill the omegas, they couldn’t have killed Mari, they couldn’t—

_“Where’s Mari?”_

Kuroo and Akaashi retreat backwards into the far corner of the corridor, giving Tsukki room.  
He hadn’t taken Akaashi’s hand when it was offered. He had flinched when Kuroo offered the same after stumbling on numb feet, but at the scent of Tsukki’s fear swelling they don’t press the issue and give him more space, moving further back when the relief softens the edges of the boy’s mind.

The pair of them exchange glances, but their emotions flicker too fast for Tsukki to name, unable to anyway where he pushed his focus into walking instead. It is the first time he stands after having given birth, but so soon after the hours of exhaustion and blood, his wounds still bear him pain and it is all he can do to keep himself standing when the first step alone feels like the muscles in his legs are being ripped in half.  
But the boy is determined, through desperation to find Mari and a rising _something_ inside him as he takes one step after another, one hand on the cellar wall to steady himself, one wrapped around his daughter’s body as she shifts, a peal of noise bubbling up between the pair of them because _they are no longer in the cell._

Kuroo tells the others to move back; all wrapped in armour and cloaks, some red, some blue, but Tsukki’s eyes are focused on Mari’s cell and he forces himself forward. The smell of rust gets stronger the deeper he pushes. Fresh tears streak down his cheeks, hot and burning, but Tsukki just thinks about putting one step in front of the other, feeling out the water-smooth stone, damp and cold and anchoring.

In the back of his mind, he knows that he is waiting for everyone to turn on him. It doesn’t matter that their swords are sheathed; they outnumber him ten to one. But Akaashi and Kuroo have not moved, even though Tsukki’s stare doesn’t hold them at bay, and with every step forward, Bokuto is pushing his guild brothers backwards, biting their names and holding on as he had with Akaashi, like he’s holding himself back from rushing forward to scoop Tsukki in his arms and stop the omega from pushing himself.  
_A fantasy,_ the blond thinks bitterly, scolding his tired mind, dragging his focus back to Mari’s cell, only allowing her name to press upon his lips, because he needs her to be okay, he needs her to be safe, he needs her to be… 

The girl in the cell was not Mari. 

Tsukki couldn’t see her face, but he knew straight away. The cold, empty touch of lingering scent was… false compared to the girl he knew; the colour of her hair dull and lifeless, an imperfect impression to Mari’s as it hung over her face, the wrong shade of moonlight.  
The girl’s eyes were dead, her skin far too pale beneath the lingering remains of bruises where the bite of twisted material was still looped around her neck. She was staring at him, through him, and into the beyond of after; lips like lavender buds where Death had given greeting and farewell in the same gasp of air. 

This wasn’t Mari.  
_It couldn’t be…_

In life, Mari had shone like the moon. In death, she was ghostly pale and hauntingly beautiful.  
Ice touched her skin in shades of blue and a cold so chilling that Tsukki felt as if he had been burned when he reached out, having thought it to be a nightmare that snared him in its spell only to be anchored into reality by the touch of her body beneath trembling fingers of bone because she’s _dead, she’s dead, she’s as cold as the earth in which she’ll be buried—_

“Hey, it’s okay,” Kuroo says to the chorus of Tsukishima’s sobs.  
Exhaustion surrounds him, so deep-rooted and all-consuming that sleep could not hope to cure him, but Tsukki knows that if he is to fall to his knees he will never rise again. In his heart he feels pain for Mari, who could not be saved like the omegas that lay dead in their cells, but in his head, Tsukki can hear a hurried whisper because he is out of his cell, there are no chains, there are no keepers.  
He is out of his cell. 

_Run._

With his daughter in his arms, Tsukki runs. 

Pain sears through his bones, his legs, his back. His lungs feel like they are filled with volcanic ash, fear choking him when shouts sound up from around him, echoing off the tomb walls, but all the boy can hear is his heart in his ears and the drums of war drowning out everything as his feet kick the wooden stairs that lead him upwards into awaiting sunshine.  
Beyond the cellar door is a maze of corridors, garish rooms and draped curtains. Tsukki knew what waited behind every door expect one, and with his daughter tucked into his chest, he barged the door with his shoulder, not wanting to slow down for a moment with the alphas nipping at his heels. 

The door gave way to large, tall-walled room that was high enough to make Tsukki’s head spin. His interruption silenced the room in the same moment, but before those gathered could understand he was omega, before they could realise one of their pets had escaped, Tsukki spun on the spot, searching for outside.  
He could feel Bokuto’s anger like fire burning his back, feel the cold of Akaashi’s disgust and it spurred his bleeding feet to run, _run run run—_

Donyuko was stood in the middle of the room, lurid in the bitter yellow of his uniform, bitterness curling in his scent like cigar smoke, hidden beneath the burning of shock, words sprung from his lips for the sake of his companions. It was the sounds of water bubbling down a drain; of sludge hitting the floor when heavy rain empties the gutter and weeds rats out from their dens.  
Beyond the man, the door to freedom is cast wide and inviting, but no weight of desperation could bring Tsukki into taking a step closer to this man that had stolen so much from him; stolen the boy, wrapped him in chains and threw him to the dank of the cellar, all for an alpha’s privilege that was bought with a few gold coins. 

Donyuko turns and his eyes meet that of his pet’s.  
Around him, his companions halt their conversation, eyes widening to what must be an amusing sight: a terrified omega trembling on his toes, dressed only in a tunic that barely reaches his thighs, holding onto a small dirty child that cries in his arms while he stares, frozen, a deer in the hunter’s crosshairs. 

Tsukki can’t think.  
He can hardly breathe. 

Behind him, the knights that had found him in the cellar burst into the room almost on top of one another, quietening themselves when they see the omega hasn’t got far.  
No one moves. They’re all holding their breath, waiting to see what happens, looking for answer to unasked questions, their confusion like an ocean that threatens to drown Tsukki; too caught in his panic to tread water as murmuring grows; a beehive of nose buzzing, stinging, thrumming with growing emotion that is too much, too soon—

All it took was for Donyuko to take a step closer for the world to shatter. 

Tsukki’s words spilt out of him; echoes of voices on the breeze, too soft and hurried to make sense of. Tears streamed from his eyes, a snowstorm building in the void of his chest as Donyuko’s cruel laughter haunts him, from the moment when Tsukki first awoke, to every lash of the whip, every alpha heat he had to endure, every painful nightmare torn apart by his screams when Tadashi was stolen from him and he was left with a distorted body that grew rotten hope in his place. 

“No, no, _no no no,”_ Tsukki whispered, over and over. He couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t hear anything but his own choking words, the sounds of his daughter crying in pain from the touch of the void that wraps around her, threatening to swallow her too. 

A wash of heat licks across his body; nicotine-bitter and heavy; a chain of iron-strong command looped around Tsukki’s throat to lead him into compliance, but the omega doesn’t react to the man’s pheromones when he is so deeply lost in his own. 

The panic that has been building inside him for years, rotten and diseased, cannot be held back any longer, and with a scream wrenched from the depths of his soul, Tsukishima unleashes everything: his hate, his fear, the blood-chilling terror that took him each night just as Donyuko and his friends had taken Tadashi across the throat and Tsukki wants him to _drown_ in it.  
He’s drowning too, but he can’t bring himself to care as he watches the alphas that had surrounded the Guildmaster draw their swords on him, reduced to snarls and growls; the animal of their instinct rising up within them. 

Words filter between the stabbing of pain; a touch suddenly against his shoulder.  
It’s the beta. Akaashi, talking soft and slow with an edge of something human in his voice as he tries to anchor Tsukki’s emotions within his own. He is blue in sadness and black in pain; silver eyes caught in tears and when he turns to his shield brothers that bear down upon the Master, and the starless scent of heartbreak mingles with Tsukki’s own. Just as he sought to protect his daughter, this beta seeks to protect those that he loves. 

This knight, who had exercised so much control in the depths of the cellar, stands here now beside Tsukki and he can’t hide the fear that swells within him when swords are drawn and it is Bokuto and Kuroo and the friends he has fought beside who steady their blades to Donyuko’s excuses, ready to cut him down.  
_Let them,_ Tsukki thinks in the void of everything and nothing. _Let them kill him._  
But he hasn’t the strength to sway so many in his favour. He hadn’t the strength to bury himself in the snowstorm much linger, and his words that had begged for freedom only moments ago, beg instead for her safety. 

“Don’t let Donyuko take her,” he says, on his knees, not knowing when he had fallen to the floor, only knowing that there is something calming in the way that Akaashi holds him, listening to the omega plead in his daughter’s stead. “Keep her safe. Don’t let Donyuko take her,” over and over, _over and over,_ until Tsukki’s voice grows hoarse and the tears dry upon his cheeks.  
“It’s okay. You’re safe now,” Akaashi whispers, a promise between the pair of them and Bokuto, who kneels beside the beta, arms steadied him in front of him to help support and anchor while Kuroo hovers around them, issuing orders to the knights that get too close and trying to follow his own commands. 

_Safe,_ Tsukki thinks, shedding fresh tears as his mind is taken by the relief and exhaustion. He can’t fight the blackness that draws in, feeling the shared relief of all three of them just before unconsciousness takes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[CONTENT FOREWARNING:** This chapter contains **Past Rape, Omega Prostitution, Suicide, Minor Character Death, Corpses.]**  
>  **Past Rape, Omega Prostitution:** Tsukki is a kidnapped Omega forced into prostitution with others omegas like him.  
>  **Suicide, Minor Character Death, Corpses:** Mari, an omegan prostitute and Tsukki’s friend, is found to have hung herself in her cell.


	2. Selcouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Selcouth: _when everything around us feels strange and different._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **[CONTENT FOREWARNING]**  
>  There are mature themes in this chapter that may be unpleasant and/or triggering to some people. To see the listed material, please scroll down to the end notes. Please note that these will contain spoilers to the story. Thank you.

The dull, steady beating of his heart was the anchor that kept Tsukki from floating adrift endlessly.

Around him, just beyond the reach of his consciousness, he can see shadows and shapes that move, like the flickering dance cast by lantern light. Only, there is confusion and unfamiliarity as the shapes of people that float about him like smoke curling in a phantom breeze; a gentleness pressed to his skin like the warmth of the sun that Tsukishima has only ever seen in his dreams.  
In his arms his daughter still lays, curled into him as he curls around her to protect her from the smoke-people that float and dance around them. 

Tsukki can hear their words lifting as they speak, about him, around him, but he only has eyes for his daughter. He sinks himself into her scent; into the fluttering of her heart, faster than his own as it tumbles into a calming melody beneath the soft voices that hum nameless words that mean little, trying to coax him from his pillow-white world, gilded in the dawn’s light.  
The shadows have no name to call to him, but the longer that they do, the more Tsukki begins to understand that it is to him that they speak to, not just about him and around him, but _to_ him. 

He blinks, and the golden sunshine is replaced by a silver moon. 

“Mari.” 

Mari floats into view. Her face is round and smiling, and she’s talking, but Tsukki can’t quite hear what she’s saying. “Mari, Mari I—”  
“Sssh, sssh, she’s fine,” Mari says, still smiling, her words floating and drifting like driftwood on the tide. She presses her hand to Tsukki’s brow, cooling, and he can’t fight the weight that drags at his eyes when he chasing the comfort that she has brought to the burning of his mind. He hadn’t noticed it beneath the pillow-white-wonderful, soft like starlight. Like her smile. 

He wants to smile too. But there is a tightness to the movement and a dull scent of rainclouds that tells him that it isn’t him, so he stops trying. Stops smiling and stops moving, because when he does, it feels like he’s moving through water; slow and weighted.  
And drowning.

Water, confusion, pain all around him, and Tsukki was drowning.

It was cold like ice, the emptiness of a moon-less night, racing with bare feet on broken glass where he had finally, _finally_ found the strength to break from the dark that held him; from winter chains and star-less lullabies that echo in mournful refrain because he had borne a daughter into this world and he wasn’t strong enough to protect her. 

When he opens his eyes, the moon is gone.  
There is only darkness. Nothingness. 

Fear rises up from empty arms, but when Tsukki cries out for his daughter, his voice doesn’t feel right in his own mouth; clouds on his tongue, and he cannot speak without rain; panic rising, screeching, pain tearing open his chest, wrenching his heart from its cage of bone because _he is back in the darkness and his daughter is gone—_

A light flickers and suddenly, Tsukki isn’t alone. 

A hand settles atop his as a stranger leans closer; with dark hair and round eyes. “Sssh. It’s okay. It’s just a bad dream. You’re safe here.”  
She is pretty, but she isn’t familiar.

“Where’s Mari?”  
His voice is like withering parchment and as frail as the hand that writes upon it.  
There is dust in his lungs and he can hardly speak. 

“Where’s Mari—?”  
“Mari is sleeping. I can fetch her—”  
“No.” It would be selfish to wake her. Sleep doesn’t come easy for those that were haunted by demons. It was in dreams that she could be free from suffering, and what right did Tsukki have to disturb her from her solace? 

His arms tighten around the space that should be filled by his daughter, tears falling in prayer that he might return to his dreams.  
It was cold and suffocating up here, with the living and the hurting. He wants to be free from it. He wants his daughter to be free from it, the pair of them free from it together; to join Tadashi wherever he may wait until once again he can wrap his arms around Tsukki, filling him with his love and his promises and their dreams of the future.  
A future that had already been torn from them by the cut of a knife, but not quick enough to free Tsukki from this nightmare of existence. 

“I’ll leave this here for you,” she says, settling the candle on a table by his bed. “Just try and get some rest for now.”  
Sleep will invite Tsukki’s own demons, but with his head on a pillow and heaviness pulling at his eyes, he finds he can’t fight the temptation. With every blink his vision dulls and the room fades from his sight.

* * *

Waking is slow, and there is no peace of sleep to drag him under again.  
His body aches with a tiredness that cannot be healed by sleep; aches with the simplicity of moving, and when Tsukki lifts his head, blinking away the haze of brightness to take in his bearings, it is like holding the weight of the earth upon his shoulders. A mountain has fallen upon his chest and a desert has filled his throat.  
For a moment too long, it is hard to breathe. 

“Slowly, slowly,” a voice says from beside him, but the sun is bright and the cotton sheets are as brilliant as snow; blinding and painful that pulls a whimper from Tsukki’s lips.  
“Easy,” the voice says, pulling the boy to sit as he eases something cool between his lips, and Tsukki washes the desert from his throat, drinking greedily as the voice ushers to him. All too soon, the glass is empty, and Tsukki feels like his throat felt dryer than before, but the glass doesn’t return and he doesn’t dare ask for more.

Slowly, the world begins to fall back into place. 

A soft, warm light shone from above him, like the sun cresting into morning, catching the morning dew to reflect into a thousand colours. They all flicker under fluttering eyelashes, growing sharper the longer Tsukki draws awareness, his eyes looking upwards as soft shadows create themselves from the pale-cream of the ceiling.  
He isn’t sure where he is, but he knows for certain that he is not in the cellar. 

Instead, Tsukki is in a white room.  
The stone bricks of the cellar have been replaced by soft-painted walls. The cells have vanished, and in their stead are a dozen beds draped by white curtains, lining the two longest walls, hung from the ceiling, held up by large timber beams.  
Tsukki is laid in one of the beds; the one furthest from the door, next to an open window that invites a breeze to sways the curtains and chase the lingering stuffiness of heat. 

And while Tsukki knows he isn’t in the cellar, or anywhere the resembles the tavern and its many rooms, he has never been in one quite like this. 

But the white walls and the golden light above him is entire foreign.  
There is the scent of freshly cut grass floating in on the breeze; wild flowers and coming rain, as well as the sounds of people in time to a rhythmic thudding of wood on leather padding that enticed Tsukki’s curiosity more than his fear that has sunk its teeth into him; weighing his arms, his legs, sinking deep inside him where an ocean has filled his lungs and the mountain still sits heavy upon his chest.

Noise attracts his attention from wondering; Tsukki turning his head to the wordless call to his attention, and his eyes find a person. He would recognise her short silver hair anywhere. 

“Mari—” 

Tsukki tried to speak, but with the mountain that made it hard to breathe, he could barely conjure the effort to speak words. His awareness was not completely his own as of it; his head heavy as it lay on cushioned pillows, and when he tries to lift himself, to move his arms and invited feeling into his fingers, he realises in a jolt of panic, that his daughter is not in his arms.  
Like a magnet he can feel a tug in his chest, where his heart should be; an ache in his palms for the want of the familiar touch of his her beneath his fingers; for her scent to embrace him as much as his arms would embrace her; to surround her and hold her— _protect her._

“Mari, where—”  
“Easy,” Mari says, turning back to Tsukki to help him where he fights his own limbs like they’re made out of lead. Her hand comes to steady him; the world shifting as the familiar warmth of _something_ filling the air around him; the rough calloused touch of her skin so jarring to the memory of velvet soft skin that could melt any alpha’s heart, and it isn’t comfort that he takes from this presence beside him, but _fear._

It isn’t Mari. 

The man shares much the same; the same shade of moonlight-silver hair but his is shorter and clean; his scent sharing his nature of omega and its honey-sweet-silken lull but that does not change the fact that he is a stranger with hidden intentions. 

Tsukki pulls himself away, having found enough strength to withdraw enough to break their line of touch.  
The man does not chase, and Tsukki is relieved because he cannot feel his legs and he wouldn’t be able to run if the situation arose.  
Panic flares when he thinks of his missing daughter. 

“Hey, it’s okay, you’re safe here,” the omega says gently, keeping his distance, but talking low and soft, as if Tsukki was nothing more than a scared child that had woken from a bad dream. 

“Where…?”  
“You’re in Mokin-Rui Guildhall. The infirmary to be precise.”  
Guildhall? That meant this was the home to Guild Knights.  
Tsukki fought to stifle his agitation before it could colour his scent rotten and malodorous; looking around, pushing his focus elsewhere. At least now he understands the reason as to why there were so many beds.  
But the man had only answered one question of a thousand. Tsukki didn’t know where to begin. He didn’t know if he was allowed to ask. 

“My name is Sugawara, but you can call me Suga,” the man smiles.  
The motion is so simple, so freely offered, that it couldn’t hide anything deceiving beneath it and Tsukki finds an odd sense of curiosity leading his scent to ask questions for him; finding the same scent of freshly cut grass, the warm wafting of baked bread and something familiar just beneath the surface, but Tsukki can’t quite recall its name. 

The man—Suga—smiles at him again, head tilting in unspoken question, his eyes meeting Tsukki’s, which flicker in a thousand questions, and yet instead it is his name that springs forth, unbidden. “Tsukki—” he says, tripping over his own name both in part to surprise that he was speaking it and the taste of sand on his tongue where the desert persists. 

“Tsukki,” Suga says, tasting the word on his tongue as he offers the boy a glass of water, helping him to sit up, propping pillows behind him so he doesn’t over exert himself so soon after waking. “It suits you.”  
It’s the same thing that Tadashi had said to him, and maybe because he was searching for something other than growing worry, or because there was warmth in the gentleness of Suga’s smile, Tsukki doesn’t correct himself. 

Sitting up helps to shake the remaining tiredness, even if Tsukki doesn’t feel quite ready to stand up just yet. His feet feel a little numb, but they don’t hurt and there isn’t the usual itch that comes from lying on a bed of old straw and cold stone floor. He has been washed, he realises, glancing down at himself to see that he’s wearing clothes—proper clothes, not his old tunic—and when he moves, there’s an apparent lightness around his neck that he hadn’t noticed before. 

Slowly, he reaches up to feel. But instead of the constant heavy metal that had become familiar to him, Tsukki feels something smooth yet coarse: a bandage wound around his neck, not tight enough to constrict, and yet he’s lost his breath, he can’t breathe because his collar is gone and the bandages—they mean that an alpha has _claimed him—_

“Tsukki, Tsukki what’s wrong?”  
Suga is still there, beside him, his fingers coming up to circle Tsukki’s wrists and pull clawing fingers away from his neck. But the grip is too much like shackles and his panic bites like the cold of winter; Suga wincing, but he doesn’t readily pull away. 

“It’s okay, you haven’t been bit.” He raises his voice to break through Tsukki’s chill, having guessed at what it could be that had brought upon such an inexorable reaction of fear when his hands are wrapped around his own throat in a virulent attack against himself—and still are, although at Suga’s words, Tsukishima is no longer clawing, but staring, wide eyes drowning in emotion.  
“You haven’t been bit,” Suga tells him again, allaying his fears with strength in his voice; stone in his scent and gravel on his tongue. 

“We removed that— _collar,”_ he says, his tongue betraying the taste of acid at the word. “Your skin was badly blistered, so we bandaged your neck after treating it.” Tsukki numbly nods along to what Suga tells him, his hand moving from where he had been clawing, reaching up to the back of his neck, pressing down, but he can’t feel any sharp pain that would reveal a claim mark.  
Suga is telling him the truth. 

He hasn’t been bitten, but when the initial panic begins to subside, there is nothing to catch him; no emotion to knot itself into a net and catch him as he freefalls into numbness, because he has been bathed, clothed and laid in a bed, just as he has been over the years when he was to await a rich alpha to lay him. 

Tsukki’s head feels foggy, his hands beginning to shake as he drops them from his neck—his unprotected neck—and curls his fingers into the bed sheets instead. He wants for his daughter again, wants to see her in the sunlight where he would be able to see every detail of her face that the lantern light hadn’t offered him; wants to hold her close because with everything around him was so different and he needed something familiar.  
Suga is watching him closely; a brush of his springtime scent brushing against Tsukki to grab his attention, his head lifting to a questioning gaze. “My daughter…” he says, because he can’t bring himself to ask for her when there is every chance Suga will shake his head with pity, Donyuko’s name said in apology and Tsukki’s world set to collapse all over again because the demon couldn’t let him leave without taking everything that ever meant anything to him. 

“She…”  
“She’s fine,” Suga says, not knowing the size of the mountain he moves with those two words alone. “At the moment. She’s with Kiyoko being nursed.” Something bitter colours his scent and he busies his hand with the glass and pitcher, eyes looking away. “You’ve been in and out of consciousness ever since the others saved you. It’s been three days since you’ve arrived here in Mokin-Rui, and with you so weak and your daughter so young, we thought that it would be better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.” 

Suga looks over, a half smile, a little sheepish, and Tsukki knows he’s staring but he’s replaying what Suga has just said. There’s relief, unimaginable relief that his daughter is safe, that Donyuko hasn’t taken her, that she’s being cared for by another, but what Tsukki can’t seem to grasp is that Suga had been completely ready to ask permission, as if he had a choice, a say.  
And now he waits with growing worry, because Tsukki hasn’t said anything, trying to understand, _she’s okay and Suga, he…_

“Tsukki?”  
“Can… can I see her?” 

But he’s said the wrong thing. 

Suga reacts, not quick violently, but there’s a physical tremor to his body, rising up from curled fists to the snap of his neck as he fixes Tsukki with a look of confused horror, shattering the boy’s friable calm.  
Just because Donyuko wasn’t here anymore didn’t mean Tsukki was free. He was still an omega, and she was still an omega’s daughter.  
They were still in the possession of the Guild Knights. 

But then Suga does something Tsukki hadn’t been expecting. 

He reaches to lay his own hand over Tsukki’s; his scent of freshly cut grass lemon-blushed and touched by rain; the corners of his smile not perfect, but somehow warmer.  
“You’re safe here. Both of you,” he says, his comfort succinct, words pure with a strength to them that Tsukki wants to believe him. And on some level, he does. 

After so many years of darkness; of having been used and mistreated, trust was not something that came easily, or came willingly. But there’s something about Suga that catches Tsukki’s panic before he can fall into it.  
Maybe it’s because it is so soon after waking, or maybe it’s because Suga is one of the first to have treated him like a human being, but Tsukki finds himself wanting the man’s words to be true. He wants to be safe here, even if it is a King’s Guild and Tsukki has felt unimaginable pain under the hand of guild knights. 

Suga gives Tsukki’s hand a gentle pat. “I’ll go find her for you.”  
And with that he’s up, carrying the glass and now-empty water pitcher with him out the door, letting it swing close behind him. 

Tsukki stares after him, and for the first time in a very long time, his thoughts aren’t flooded beneath the desire to run. Tiredness still clings to his skin like sweat, and he could never run without his daughter in his arms, but Tsukki was aware that the door was unlocked and, if he had the strength, he could leave this bed and walk with no one to stop him.  
And yet now that he could, all Tsukki wanted to do was sleep. 

His exhaustion wasn’t due to the lack of sleep—maybe more because that’s all he’s been doing for three days—but instead the confusion of everything around him; the new room, the new faces; the new sensation of cotton sheets against his skin rather than the rough-itch of old clothes and fetid of rotting straw.  
Even Tsukki himself, looking down at his pale fingers that pinch the edges of the sheets, etiolated over the years that they barely looked human; skin and bone in comparison to Suga’s when they had touched; void of warmth and softness as if the horrors that Tsukki had survived hadn’t simply stained his soul in the pitch black of fear, but moulded his skin, his body, into something eldritch. 

Without a mirror or a reflection, Tsukki searches with his hands.  
They start at his face, moving across the sweaty skin of his forehead, fingers threading through his unkempt hair—greasy and matted in places—down to the bone of his cheeks, sharp and rigid and far too prominent. His lips are chapped and dry despite Suga’s offering of water, and now that Tsukki has noticed, he can feel the desert filling his throat like a time-turner counting down until his lungs were full. 

He doesn’t touch his neck or let his fingers roam anywhere near the bandages that hide his skin. He was told he hadn’t been bitten, had let himself explore as far as he was confident to, and didn’t want to think how close he had come to losing the one thing that had kept him sane. 

Tsukki’s hands roam over the shirt that he had been given, but he can feel his bones; see the thinness in his arms as he looks down at his mosaiced body; tears spilling unbidden when his hands hover over his stomach to an emptiness that feels foreign when his arms carry the same weightlessness. 

Something black churns inside him.  
Something ugly and horrid and Tsukki’s blunted nails are drawing blood before he realised what he’s doing. There’s no itch to scratch, but he can feel dirt on him like it’s the colour of his skin, his hands tracing over his bare skin, fingers ghosting over his wrists where he searches for the wounds that had so long ago littered his body when he had worn shackles to remind him of his worth, as much as the bruises that besieged his skin. 

There are no fresh bruises or wounds that Tsukki hasn’t inflicted on himself, and there’s some sort of fear that he has sunlight to be able to see his hands, his arms, the pale of his skin and yellowing of old tempers flaring. 

Exhaustion washes in and he feels himself slumping down into the pillows, head rolling to the door, wanting his daughter and wanting a distraction to pull his mind from this strange and different world. He had thought that, when he found freedom (if he was really, truly _free)_ then Tsukki would feel relieved that he was no longer in the cellar.  
But instead, there’s darkness inside him: Black fear churning, fetid-rot and volcanic-ash; dry oceans and silent forests of fear because the world—everything he has known for god knows how long has begun to crumble, and now he doesn’t know what to expect, doesn’t know how to act, doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know who to trust because he doesn’t know what they _want—_

“Tsukki?” 

Tsukki looks up, eyes wide, heart in his throat.  
But it’s only Suga, and then, it’s not, because there is a girl beside him. With dark hair and round eyes and Tsukki’s daughter cradled in her arms; swaddled in a cotton blanket, her scent warm like sunshine and Tsukki’s heart yearns for her. 

“This is Kiyoko,” Suga says, gesturing. “She’s been looking after your daughter while you were asleep.”  
His smile looks a little forced, his scent still touched by rain, but he doesn’t ask any questions and he doesn’t bring attention to the pain beneath Tsukki’s nails as he curls his hands around his arms to stop himself from reaching out for his daughter. He wants to trust and he wants to hope, but he’s so close to breaking that he just might if they don’t let him hold her one last time. 

“I wanted to apologise for taking the responsibility of caring for her while you were sleeping,” Kiyoko says and she’s quiet; even more soft spoken than Suga, looking to the child in her arms rather than Tsukki himself, approaching slow. “We thought it would be better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”  
Tsukki nods, but his eyes are on his daughter, his heart in his lungs when Kiyoko closes the space between them and leans over to settle the baby in Tsukki’s arms, cotton blanket and all. 

Tsukki stares at his daughter, tears in his eyes when he realises that she is here, in his arms, touched by sunlight. It’s the first time, he realises, that he can truly see her, precious and fragile and perfect.  
He recognises the fair wispy hair on her head to be an echo of his own. She hasn’t got any freckles like her father, and while the thought is upsetting and Tsukki is on the edge of tears, it’s enough that she is here, that he is here; that they’re here together. 

“Thank you,” he says to no one in particular, eyes on the baby in his arms and no one else. If he didn’t have anything other than her, it would be more than enough, he thinks as he pulls her close, breathing in her scent and letting his own paint itself into dreams; a thousand colours that fill the sky and the sea and everything in between; bright and warm. 

Slowly, she opens her eyes, and in them, Tsukki can see his and Tadashi’s colours mingled together. 

He holds tight to his daughter, unashamed to cry.

* * *

Tsukki decides that he likes Suga, and not just because he is the first person, in a long while, to treat him more than the worth of his omegan status. 

Suga is an omega too. That might have something to do with Tsukki’s acceptance of him, but it isn’t the whole of it.  
He is honest and forth coming when Tsukki—encouraged with his daughter sleeping in a cradle by his bedside—begins to ask questions about where they are and what he had missed between escaping the cellar and waking here.  
And without hesitation, Suga tells him. 

He explained that Tsukki had been brought to Mokin-Rui after the knights had raided Magma Styr: the lawless town that had been home to the brothel where Tsukki and the other omega had been kept. Mokin-Rui was the nearest Guildhall, and with him so ill, a newborn in his arms and the uncertainty of the situation in the town, it was decided by the Guildmaster—Ukai, not Donyuko—that Tsukki would be better cared for behind secure walls. 

While Suga explains, Tsukki eats a simple meal that had been brought to the infirmary at the other’s request, Tsukki not emboldened enough to ask and Suga mothering enough to understand that it’s been three days since he had eaten anything. Neither knew how many years it had been since he had eaten actual food, but certainly, Tsukki never knew bread could taste anything other than stale and somehow, he was even hungrier after eating everything brought for him. 

The late morning crawls into early afternoon, and all the while Suga stays with Tsukki, keeping him company with light conversation.  
It isn’t until Suga makes a passing comment that, later on, Ukai and maybe some others will be in to see him, that they finally begin to address that which brought Tsukki here. 

Although he has been imbued with an unfamiliar sense of confidence to ask his questions, Suga, on the other hand, isn’t shy in displaying the awkwardness he feels talking about… _that._  
He keeps his eyes averted and there’s an obvious hesitation as he chews his words, tastes them before speaking; little subtle glances that aren’t subtle at all, as if Tsukki will offer him an out. 

But he won’t. 

Tsukki wants, no, _needs_ to know what happened. He wants to know what will happen, what comes next, what happened to the men that made his existence near unbearable and _is his daughter safe from them?_

“It’s… a mess, I won’t lie,” Suga says, taking a deep breath and sighing it all out, resigned to skirting around the edge of everything rather than running at it head on.  
“Fukutsu—that’s his guild—” he says, having already seen the involuntary ripple of tension that courses through Tsukki’s body at the mention of Donyuko’s name, “—have been recalled from their duties to be questioned about their… involvement. There are those that have already had their names cleared but what with everything that’s gone on, Ukai and Nekomata thought it would be better that they don’t have free reign, so they’re being kept under supervision here and—”  
_“Here?”_

Tsukki couldn’t help himself, one hand reaching out to his daughter’s crib where she still sleeps, instinct demanding he protect her.  
But Suga was already waving his hands, as if to knock the words out of the air. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said hurriedly, over and over, until Tsukki began to calm, not having realised that his panic had reared up so high, so quickly; waves at sea that threatened to capsize the vessel of hope he had found, his gale-wind breathing returning to the shallow gentle breeze that swayed the curtains and brought the faintest scent of wild flowers and coming rain. 

“They won’t come anywhere near you or your daughter. With everything that has happened, tensions are running high, and it’s not like they can move without the entire guild knowing. Besides,” he says with a private smile, “Bokuto has planted himself on the stairs. No one is getting past him anytime soon.” 

Bokuto.  
The name was familiar. 

“He was one of those that found you,” Suga explains, having caught the faintest shadow of confusion. “He’s very protective as it is, but after what he had seen in Magma Styr. He was one of those that argued that you be brought here. There were a few against it for various reasons,” Suga says with a wave of his hand, something bitter in his scent, obviously agreeing with Bokuto.  
“They’re still not that happy, but considering you’ve got some of the strongest and smartest of Mokin-Rui on your side, the only one that would dare barge in here would be the King, and he can’t exactly leave the capital without everyone in the kingdom hearing about it.” He laughed to himself, as if he had made an amusing joke. 

“The king?” 

Tsukki felt a little stupid parroting Suga’s words back at him, but he had thought having his questions answered would bring him clarity, not give him another thousand questions because Tsukki couldn’t understand why the King would want to know what had happened to a lowly, no-name omega on the edge of the kingdom. 

Suga was back to averting Tsukki’s gaze and trying to side step giving him an answer.  
“I’m probably not the best person to explain everything. I wasn’t anywhere near the tavern when you were found, or when Donyuko was confronted. I was with my team on the other side of town,” he said apologetically, casting a glance. “Daichi might be able to explain it better. He was there. He was one that saw the whole mess.” 

At that moment, there was a light knock on the door and someone poked their head into the infirmary, grinning.  
“Do I hear someone talking about me?” 

He’s tall—not intimidatingly tall—but a definite figure in the room that demands Tsukki’s attentions as his eyes sweep over broad shoulders and thick muscled arms littered with a few scars, none of which are hidden when he bears a sleeveless tunic and leather shale-like armour.  
A fine layer of sweat shimmers across his skin, tanned from being underneath the sun, and his scent breathes mischief in a swirl of dragon-scale reds that bleeds into his grin as he makes his way into the room. 

Instantly, Suga matched the man’s smile, sliding out of the chair that had been pulled to Tsukki’s bedside, stepping quickly to meet Daichi in the middle of the room while Tsukki watched on, a little unnerved by his sudden appearance. He could feel the prickling in his chest calm when Suga pressed his lips to Daichi’s cheek, tilting his head to let him quickly drag his nose along the edge of his chin, pressing his scent into Suga’s, and now Tsukki recognises what he hadn’t earlier. 

Alpha. 

_Danger._

Tsukki pulled his daughter into his arms without a second thought, protected within his arms, her sudden waking echoed in trembling-lip cries and a fear, rock-sharp and mountain tall because there is an alpha and he might not be one of those that has hurt him before, but he was one of those that had been talking with Donyuko, smiling alongside the man like he knew him, like the two of them were _friends…_

Tsukki’s scent flares into panic; white noise buzzing filling his head as he stares at this new threat and the omega he trusted that was paired with him, shoving the alpha back, eyes only on Tsukki with his hands up, his voice soft, words stuck on repeat, “you’re safe, you’re okay,” over and over, _over and over—_

“He was there,” Tsukki bites, air like poison in his lungs because he can’t _breathe,_ he can’t catch his breath over the intensity of his daughter’s pain and he wants to soothe, he wants to hush her, but Tsukki’s eyes haven’t left the alpha’s, trying to read him, trying to understand what danger he poses, what he _wants—_

But the alpha doesn’t move closer.  
He stays in the middle of the room, hands raised in surrender, his face passive and watching. His scent is oakwood and turned earth, the smell of sweat and a slight ache of tiredness from a long day’s ride. He is submissive to Suga’s orders as the omega tells him to move backwards; Tsukki’s panic losing its sharpness with every step.  
“You’re safe Tsukki. No one will hurt you. Daichi won’t come near you,” Suga says, voice soft, hiding the worry that fills him just like fear fills Tsukki and guilt fills Daichi. 

“I… panicked,” the boy says, in way of explanation and apology, eyes still fixed on the alpha as he takes another three paces back, until he is stood next to the door that he appeared around. He makes no move to leave, however, but neither does he make a move to step forward.  
“He won’t hurt you; he was one of the ones that saved you.”  
But Tsukki can’t recall that much. He knows the three faces that pulled him from the darkness and knows the man that was responsible and he _knows_ that Daichi was there. 

But Daichi has backed off at Suga’s command, and there’s no hate, no disgust, nothing that Tsukki had come to expect from alphas. 

Tsukki can breathe again.  
There’s still a tightness in his chest, but he can breathe and he believes what Suga has told him; that they’re helping him here, and while he might not know exactly what is going on, there is some part of him that understands that he’s safe. 

He apologises to Daichi, but with only the protection of layered bandages, he doesn’t feel safe enough to bare his neck, praying that the notion would be overlooked when he turns his attention to calming his daughter.  
She was more startled than anything, feeding off her mother’s fear and echoing it, not understanding the reason why, so when Tsukki orchestrates his own scent back into the warm mellow of honey, into ocean tides and white-wave horses, she gurgles her peace and turns into his chest, content. 

It takes some time for the rest of them to return to the calm that they had enjoyed for most of the morning, and Tsukki is certainly rattled, not wanting to lay his daughter back in her crib, using her as an anchor, and anchoring himself in the fact that she was safer in his arms. Safer here in Mokin-Rui than back in that cellar. 

The closest Daichi comes is the bed opposite Tsukki’s.  
He perches himself on the end, pulling off his cloak and accepting the glass of water Suga offers him as they make small conversation; Suga asking Daichi about his ride, his smile real and warm.  
Tsukki can’t help but be reminded of Tadashi and himself, sat in separate cells, opposite one another, whispering back and forth in the darkness, and finding a rare sense of peace in conversation. 

The memories are harder to face than Tsukki’s abuse, and he banishes them from his mind before he can feel anything more than a numb sense of loss, buried beneath his daughter warm against his chest. He curls the longer lengths of her blonde hair around his finger, content to watch her mouth at the air, hands and little tiny fingers reaching, wrapping around Tsukki’s hand and holding on with a death grip that she looked far too delicate to possess.  
“I’m not going anywhere,” he promises her, his smile widening when she looked up at him with intelligent honey-brown eyes. She gurgles, and Tsukki can’t help closing the distance to press a kiss to her forehead. 

They’re watching him, but trying to make it seem like they’re not watching him. 

Suga is still smiling, but there’s something warm and wanting within it that is unfamiliar, but it’s gone before Tsukki can understand as Suga glances to Daichi. “We were talking about what happened in Magma Styr,” he says, his voice conveying more than he was willing to say. 

“Tsukki wanted to know,” he explains, looking to Daichi, “and I tried the best I could, but I was chasing down the stragglers that were running. I wasn’t anywhere near the tavern, and it’s not like I know much anyway, considering that all of those that were involved have been sworn by Ukai and Nekomata to keep quiet about it. Besides, half of them are still in Magma Styr.”  
“Nekoma stayed behind,” Daichi cuts in, “but I brought everyone back today. They’re unpacking, but we’ll have a debrief with Ukai when he’s ready.”  
He turns to Tsukki, a flicker of guilt shadowing the lines on his face when Tsukki stiffens at the sudden attention. 

“I can explain to you what happened after Akaashi and the others found you. I know it’s probably not something you want to talk about, but our Guildmaster has his own questions and he can explain it a lot better than I. If you’re ready to hear Mokin-Rui’s side, then would you be willing to answer some of our questions too—?”  
“Wait, wait, stop!”

Suga’s anger was evident, barbed in both scent and tongue, but it was turned on his mate, flaring and dying before Tsukki had a chance to react. “You saw how he reacted to when you came in here, how the hell do you think he’s going to react when everyone comes barging their way in. And don’t tell me they won’t,” Suga hissed, pointing his finger when Daichi made to open his mouth.  
“I’ve seen the numbers that are here already. Nekoma as well as Fukutsu. Not to mention the fact that Matsukawa and Hanamaki have been called from the capital in the King’s stead.”

That was the second time the King was mentioned, and Tsukki still couldn’t understand why. He didn’t think asking now would give him an answer either, as Suga hissed his aversion and Daichi attempted to calm him. “He’ll have to speak to them eventually Suga—”  
“He’s just woken up. It’s too soon. It’s—”  
“Isn’t it Tsukki’s place to decide? If he wants to know, then he’s willing to talk about it. And dragging Ukai and Nekomata in here will mean that he only has to talk about it once,” Daichi says, his logic outweighing Suga’s emotion, hand on the silver’s arms, one on his cheek to pull their eyes to meet. 

Their affection for one another felt private, and Tsukki averted his eyes to the window where the trees talk with the wind, but there was nothing to distract him from their words, as Suga fights for Tsukki to keep what little peace he has found, and Daichi needs answers that only Tsukki has.  
It makes something warm and uncomfortable churn in the boy’s stomach. He knows Suga can feel it too, knows that it bleeds into both of their scents when Daichi straightens and Tsukki’s daughter gurgles discomfort. 

“I will answer what questions I can,” Tsukki says, still staring out the window. It is the only thing these people have asked of him since he has woken up.  
If it was the only thing they wanted, and Tsukki answered everything, he knew he would still consider it to be a poor repayment when they had saved his life. 

“You don’t have to,” Daichi starts, but he is silenced when Tsukki turns to him, steel in his eyes. “Now or later won’t change the story. And I’m ready now.” 

Suga still looked like he wants to object, but seeing Tsukki, he doesn’t say anything more. To Tsukki, at least, but when Daichi nods in understanding and said that he will go and find Ukai, Suga tells him, in no uncertain terms, only those that are necessary. “He’s already bearing too much as it is. He shouldn’t have to do it to an audience.” 

Daichi accepts Suga’s words and bows his departure, looking a lot more tired than he did when coming in, leaving Suga and Tsukki in an uncomfortable silence. 

“You can always change your mind,” the older says eventually, breaking whatever tension had begun to fill the air. He closes the gap between them, coming to sit, once again, by Tsukki’s bedside wearing that familiar smile and trying to cover what apprehension he feels towards what waits for them on the other side of the door.  
His mate has questions, and Tsukki has some of his own, and if he can repay those that have saved him by standing in a room full of alphas that want nothing more than to ask him a bunch of questions, then he will.  
His tenacious attitude doesn’t dispel his worry, however, and it prickles against his skin like a cold breeze, unsettling him and his daughter, who squirms as if trying to get away from it. 

Suga runs a finger along her arm, enchanted by her, just like Tsukki feels when he looks down at her perfection and is caught up by the wonder that she is his. _Still_ his. _Still alive._

“Do you think it would be better for Kiyoko to look after her while the others talk to you?” 

_No,_ Tsukki thinks instantly, and it must show, because Suga withdraws his hand. But not his suggestion.  
“You say you want to talk to the others, and that’s fine, that’s your choice,” he says. “But she’s young enough to feel every emotion that you do. And you’re about to relive through things that we can’t imagine.” 

Tsukki begins to understand what Suga’s telling him.  
He’s already shown him how quickly he jumps to panic, how quickly his daughter reads his scent and echoes it. It wouldn’t be fair to keep her with him, even if she does help to settle his nerves. It’s a hard decision to make, and yet, there is no decision at all as he carefully, carefully, hands her over to Suga, keeping himself calm as not to worry her where the jostling wakes her from her light doze. 

It isn’t the first time she’ll be gone from him, but it’s the first time Tsukki is aware of it, and there’s something inside him that holds on before Suga can step away from the bed*side; a mother’s instinct to care and protect and while Tsukki trusts Suga, knows that he cares for him as much as her, it’s still… _painful,_ to let go. 

“She’ll be safe,” Tsukki says, not in question, but more for his own sake. “She’ll be safe. She won’t be far, and as soon as they’re gone, Kiyoko will bring her back.”  
And Tsukki has to let her go. 

It isn’t until Suga is at the door does he stop, turning back with a sheepish kind of grin. “It feels a little late to be asking now, but, what’s her name?” 

Tsukki’s mind goes blank. He had only been thinking of her as his daughter, knowing that, all throughout the pregnancy he had been faced with the reality that she would be ripped from his arms as soon as she was born. He had seen it plenty of times with the others, knowing that growing attached would only make it harder; that giving them a name would be like a brand on their hearts.  
And maybe it was fear, or maybe it was just what Tsukki knew that he had neglected to give her a name. 

She should have Tadashi’s surname, he thinks. She is his daughter too, and the last reminder of him.  
But when Tsukki tries to say “Yamaguchi,” he stumbles, not having realise how painful it was to say his name out loud.  
Suga mishears him. “Yachi? That’s suits you.” 

Tsukki agrees.  
It’s a simple nickname, but it’s better than not being able to speak it for the pain it brings, smiling as Suga coos to her gurgling.  
His daughter, Hitoka Yamaguchi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[CONTENT WARNING:** This chapter contains **Disassociation.]**  
>  **Disassociation:** When Tsukki first wakes he is in a dissociative state that confuses his perception of time.


	3. Aphelion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aphelion: _the point of a planet’s orbit furthest from the sun_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **[CONTENT FOREWARNING]**  
>  There are **HEAVY** themes in this chapter that may be unpleasant and/or triggering to some people. To see the listed material, please scroll down to the end notes. Please note that these will contain spoilers to the story. Thank you. 
> 
> As a heads up; this is as dark as the story gets. There will be more angst, but nothing as severe or dark as the subjects touched in this chapter.

Tsukishima recognises more faces than he thought he would. 

Presently, there are nine Guild Knights that have gathered in the infirmary, including the familiar faces of his rescuers; Bokuto, Akaashi and Kuroo; the three of them having quickly settled themselves on the bed to Tsukki’s immediate right.   
He had been surprised by their arrival, and yet he was comforted by their presence and Bokuto’s incessant chatter that continued to fill the quiet while they waited for the others to situate themselves. He keeps returning to his need to apologise for scaring Tsukki in the cellar, repeating his relief at the fact that Tsukki is awake now and recovering, and that Yachi is healthy too. Akaashi has to keep reminding him to lower his voice, fingers often slipping around his wrist from where it looks as if Bokuto is physically having to restrain himself from jumping up out of his chair and grappling Tsukishima into a bone-crushing hug.  
Kuroo sits beside him, a lazy smile pulled across his features, but Tsukki isn’t fooled when he can scent the man’s uncertainty swirling like water beneath a deceptively calm surface. 

It is the same uncertainty that lifts and builds from the other unfamiliar faces that keep themselves turned away; voices quiet as they debate a thousand things between themselves in voices far too quiet to make out words.

Tsukki wants to ignore them as much as they are ignoring him, but he can’t help but watch them, tensing each time the men by the window shift their weight from one foot to the other; eyes darting towards the bitterness hissing between the teeth of the yellow-cloaked Knight Captain; the burning in his throat scratching like the beginnings of a fever when the infirmary door opens for a countless time and Tsukki’s attention is dragged from where he twists his fingers into the bed sheets, staining their snow-white perfection with blood from beneath his nails as Daichi pushes into the room, his scent calm; oakwood and turned earth. 

Behind him, he is closely followed by an Alpha; tall, foreboding; his golden hair slicked back and kept in place with black-metal pins, a distinct smell of smoke clinging to his midnight cloak, and a rough edge to his voice that makes Tsukki withdraw unconsciously, pushing himself closer to Bokuto’s softer, kinder words. The man is yet to turn his eyes towards him; still in mid-conversation with a third.   
The third man is shorter, with the same soft-spun silver of hair like Suga, yet unlike him, this was due to age. It shows as much in the crinkling smile stretched upon his features; crow’s feet deep beside his eyes and wrinkles upon his forehead that have long since made their mark. 

Their scents are overwhelming; their presence silently suffocating and Tsukki does not know how long he’ll be able to stand being in their company. But it’s not like he has any choice.   
They believe that something of great importance in hiding in his memories. What it could be, and what questions they might ask to bring it to light, Tsukki does not know.   
All he can do is take a deep breath. He holds it, folding his fingers into the cotton sheets, and waits. 

Suga had already explained to him that there were people that needed to hear his statement, having apologised countless times alongside explaining that Tsukki is wrapped up in something bigger than anyone had expected when they first raided Magma Styr.   
The magnitude was such that, normally, this kind of questioning would be held in the capital, under the judgement of the king, Daichi having explained as much as he was able earlier this morning; Tsukki not understanding why the King would want to bother with him in any regard, and in turn being told that he is far more important than he realises; that Tsukki had been at the heart of an issue that has been affecting the Taiyoyami for longer than anyone has realised. 

Daichi held a similar approach to his explanations as his pair; Suga having been less than willing to talk about the details of something abhorrent and vile, Daichi even more tight-lipped that had him tip-toeing around this scourge that had infected the deep recesses of the kingdom of Taiyoyami. He had simply said that it involves the King’s Guilds, and in turn, involves the King. There had been word—and worry—that the representatives had been sent by Oikawa, not just to listen, but to take Tsukishima back to Yukiyama with them; Suga having assured Tsukki such wouldn’t happen; that their Guildmaster would convince the pair otherwise and that they would follow after, once he had recovered strength enough to handle the journey. 

It was the Guildmaster, Ukai, who had convinced the King to allow Mokin-Rui to hold a smaller assembly, with representatives from the other guilds to make them aware of the current situation; Ukai’s reasonings being, that Tsukki was not strong enough to bear the time it will take to travel to Yukiyama and, while he shouldn’t be pushed given his state, it also wouldn’t do to allow Donyuko’s allies to go into hiding.   
And so, King Oikawa had given agreement to the audience, having sent representatives in his stead to carry news of their findings back to him. 

They are the two men by the window; grand in their uniforms despite the dust and dirt of the road clinging to their teal-spun tunics; with their stern faces and bitten remarks that spill from the shorter’s mouth with the fluidity of water, and yet it is not nearly so welcoming as an oasis in the desert. Tsukki doesn’t want to admit it out loud, but the two scare him. He is once again grateful for Suga’s presence and Bokuto’s mindless twittering, leaning closer to the Alpha’s encompassing scent of mountain stone and Suga’s honey-warmth comfort.   
He has been given permission to stay despite not being a part of the group that raided the brothel for both Tsukishima’s sake and his own; this dispute already having sparked and been laid to rest when Orio, the Knight Captain in the yellow cloak, had questioned his participation and need to be present when her own guild members were barred to the dining hall downstairs. 

Suga had given the girl clipped answers; emotions getting the better of him with teeth bared and scent sour when Tsukki had responded with fear. He had an ally in Suga; an ally in Daichi, Bokuto, Kuroo and Akaashi too, but it was Suga who had been there when Tsukishima woke up and he who had given him back his daughter and he who has been defending Tsukki from the start; from the haunting fear of Donyuko having taken Yachi from him; from the confusion of what will come next.   
And even then, when he had stood with balled fists and spit on his tongue to defend the decision that he remains, Akaashi right there beside him, no need for anything other than words when he tells Orio, in no uncertain terms, that Suga stays. 

There was no reason given, but Orio didn’t question him; didn’t say anything more; and with the matter seemingly settled, she returned to lean against the wall, arms folded, brow furrowed, scent exuding something akin to the rotting of disgust. 

And Tsukki began to wonder who Akaashi was. 

He had given clear instructions to Bokuto and Kuroo both in the cellar—instructions that neither of them fought against or complained about—following his words without question to his nature of being Beta, being beneath them as if instead he were Alpha and they his thrall.   
But when the others had entered the infirmary, parading their different coloured cloaks and holding their presence like a knife edge against the pulse of Tsukki’s throat, they had given the formalities of their greetings to Bokuto and Kuroo, almost seemingly ignoring Akaashi as if he wasn’t here. 

And yet, the moment that Akaashi stands against Orio—who Tsukishima is wary of anyway, when it is that she bears _Fukutsu’s_ colours—the fight dies before it even begins and the Knight Captain backs off.   
Tsukki doesn’t know who Akaashi is, but he is thankful that the Beta is on his side. For now. 

It has been a fair few hours since the boy had first woken, enough that the light beyond the window is crimson in colour, dusk soon to lead them into the night, and it is only now that the Guildmaster and the last of the knights have arrived.   
Tsukishima is still surprised that more haven’t pushed to attend, knowing there to be more than the eleven that have gathered—if not from Orio’s earlier argument then simply from knowing that he is in the infirmary of Mokin-Rui’s Guildhall—but it’s not like he wants more to crowd the space than necessary.   
The scents and smells of those gathered are near enough too much as they are—mountain stone, rust, bitter winter and frostbite; and yet Tsukki is surprised to find that he and Suga are not the only Omegas. The Teal-Cloak, with his light hair and sharp voice, is Omegan, as is the Yellow-Cloak on the far side of the room who stands beside his Knight Captain and looks for all the world like he wishes to be anywhere else. It is the only familiarity Tsukishima can find with those gathered. 

The infirmary, with its towering pillars and vaulted ceiling, somehow is made to feel cramped with the assembly of the Guild Knights, but there is ease in their quiet and the distance they keep from Tsukishima’s bed; only his rescuers and Suga close enough for the boy to detect intricacies in their scents while the others stand in their groups; the Teal-Cloaks by the window, the Yellow-Cloaks by the far wall, no one other than Bokuto giving Tsukishima their attention and it makes him feel as if he is the one that is interrupting them; not that they’ve gathered here to listen to the answers he will gives.  
Daichi settles into the empty chair besides Suga, Ukai and the older Red-Cloak taking up two that have been positioned at the end of Tsukishima’s bed; the boy’s fingers curling into the snow of cotton sheets in efforts to ground himself when fear rises acidic in his throat. Rises further when the other Guild Knights peel themselves from where they had been kicking dust to come closer, like predators closing in for the kill. 

It starts with Ukai introducing himself as Mokin-Rui’s Guildmaster. 

Tsukki already knows who the man is from Suga, when he had explained about what the assembly would entail—in as few words as the omega could impart—Ukai then turning to introduce the older man who sits beside him as Nekomata, Guildmaster of the Nekoma Guild.   
Tsukki simply nods. His mouth feels parched, his fingers biting under his skin from how tight they are wound into the blankets but he can’t will himself to let go when it feels like it is the only thing he’s holding on to. He doesn’t have his daughter to anchor him; not trusting enough in those around him to bury himself in their scents; the years of abuse and confinement not so easily undone in an afternoon of idle conversation; treated like a human for the first time in memory. 

But the fear that he can feel mounting in his chest is forgotten about when Ukai makes a simple, and yet unexpected motion that cuts through the tangled thoughts in Tsukki’s mind and leaves him drifting aimlessly. 

Because Ukai has only gone and bowed his head. 

“Firstly, I wish to apologise,” he says, head bowed, his voice unwavering in its strength of clarity; the scents of mint and aloe filling the air to drown out Tsukki’s bitter-sharp-acid-fear. “I wouldn’t ask this of you so soon after you had woken if it wasn’t important. Daichi has told me that you were willing to answer our questions, and in return we will answer anything you wish to know.”  
He bows his head lower, as if expecting retaliation; Nekomata and the rest of them following suit, although none of them bow as low as the Guildmaster. 

Tsukki stares, silent, because if he didn’t know better, it was almost as if Ukai, an Alpha, was bowing to him. To _Tsukki._  
To an _omega._

He glances to his right, wide eyed and confused, but Suga’s honey-warm-comfort offers him nothing it hasn’t before; and as the silence fills the room, Tsukki can feel an of confusion rising within him. He had been caught off guard by this show of emotion that is nothing towards the demand of questions he had simply expected to be asked; this show of… whatever it may be vastly different than the bark of an Alpha’s orders; the overwhelming stench of lust and disgust that painted their scents the murkiness of oil; the value of Tsukishima’s worth something when Ukai raises his head and sees Tsukki as more than an omega in a cell. 

He hears the pause of silence then; Tsukki realising far too late that something is expected of him, air rising like ash in his throat and he doesn’t have time to fear the consequence of speaking to an Alpha without order; the words coming in a rush to save himself from the crack of a whip when he bows his head, bearing the back of his neck—freezing when he remembers he no longer has a collar to protect him—wet-eyes staring at bloody nails.   
“I can’t promise I know what it is that you are after, but I will answer everything as best as I am able.”

“And that is more than we can ask,” comes a soft voice; kitten fur and knotted twine; Tsukishima raising his head to be met with Nekomata’s softened smile. It is familiar, in an indescribable sort of way, until Tsukki’s eyes flicker to the movement beside him; to Kuroo’s mask of a lazy smile and the hidden observancy hidden in the depth of his gaze; the pain he so expertly hides from all except Tsukki, and Akaashi, who slips two fingers around the boy’s wrist and holds on, anchoring him. 

Tsukki wishes for an anchor too; something beyond the bed sheets and the ache in his legs; the too-soft pillows that have been propped beneath his back and the headboard. He thinks he can hear Yachi crying, but knows it is only in his imagination, and even if it wasn’t, she is safe with Kiyoko; far safer from Tsukki’s unpredictable emotions when he is soon to bare whatever horrors he lived through in the depths of Magma Styr’s filth. 

Guilt vies with confusion, fear, trepidation and the other thousand emotions that crash like a storm in Tsukki’s mind; the pregnant silence around him drawing in once more as he is met with expectant faces; they having only saved him because they thought that he would be able to help them, to answer their questions, but Tsukki’s not even sure what is going on and his mind cannot help but fear what they will do to him once they learn he is of no use to them. 

Suga has said that Tsukishima and his daughter were safe her; Tsukki wondering if that was because Suga didn’t know him to be useless.   
If the punishment is to be death, all he can hope is that it is swift and painless.

“Do you know the person that kept you captive,” Ukai asks, Tsukki’s eyes snapping to him once more, breath caught in his throat now that the interrogation has begun. He feels trapped in the maw of a beast; the bars of his cage the sharp of a wolf’s fangs and Tsukki can do nothing. His body is bound to the bed beneath cotton wrapping; the sheets no longer a comfort but shackles to hold him still; unable to do anything but speak.

But he doesn’t wish to say the man’s name.   
It was a curse in his own mouth; poisonous and infectious that would taint the very air he breathed to speak it out loud. 

Around the room, the others react to the change in his scent; Hanamaki of the Auyoake Paladins the only one to take a full step back, hands balled into fists at his sides; the rest of them turning nose from the acrid-dandelion-urine of fear that had become a near constant in the confines of Tsukishima’s cell that he doesn’t even notice the change. 

All he can focus on is Ukai, because he doesn’t think that he’ll be able to cope with anything else; giving him a near-imperceptible nod of his head that he gives in answer to the man’s question.   
But it doesn’t seem to be enough; Ukai tilting his head in want for more. 

Tsukki has been met with foot or fist alike when he uttered the man’s name before, and it feels like a cruel and twisted game when Ukai gives him a soft, apologetic smile, saying, “I’m sorry, I know that this is hard, but I need you to give me their name—their full name, if you know it.” 

_Alpha,_ Tsukishima’s mind reminds him, and the boy knows not to disobey. 

He struggles, expectedly, fingers curling into the bedsheet until they are bone white and creaking; a touch from snapping into a thousand little pieces as Tsukki chases air in lungs half-frozen in fear that invoking his name will summon the man from wherever he hides; eyes flicking to the obnoxious sweeping yellow of the twin-cloaks that stand at Ukai’s shoulder.   
And just as the man opens his mouth, Tsukki speaks first. 

_“Donyuko Junichiro.”_

Their reactions are dull and muted, as if they already knew this but it was amusing to watch Tsukishima jump through hoops like a trained mutt; anger broiling at them all, and himself, a restlessness in the soles of his feet that ripples outwardly to those gathered, each reacting in their own way, but reacting all the same. 

Tsukki cannot help but hate it; having hated being a spectacle for Alpha and Beta in the dark, and now a spectacle for many as they poke and prod, and ask questions they already know the answers to. If he cannot hold his daughter to be his anchor, if he cannot find a mask to hide behind, then he will fashion one himself.   
He draws a breath to steady his heart, letting his scent fade immeasurably, weaving it into a static cloak so those around him will only perceive trepidation, the slight muddle of confusion and the sharp taste of water that he had found upon waking.   
If anyone notices the gradual shift, they don’t react. 

Neither Ukai, who continues, pretending just like all the others that he can’t see the omega’s façade of calm crumbling at its edges. 

“Do you know why Don—why _he_ kept you captive?” he asks, amending his question when Tsukishima involuntarily flinches at hearing the man’s name—his cloak masking his scent, not his actions—not wanting to challenge fate any more than he has already, eyes fixed to the door as if he would come barging through at any moment, his oil-slick-smoke scent set to choke Tsukishima like a noose around his throat; tightening until he can’t breathe.   
There’s confusion from Suga, from Kuroo and Akaashi, because they can see the boy’s fear but cannot smell it; but should Tsukishima let a drop of emotion through, the tide will break and he will drown in the flood. 

Drown in the fear that holds him, as he stares at the infirmary door.   
But it remains closed and the silence heavy; pain like poison in Tsukki’s body, coursing through his veins, through his blood; eldritch fingers twisted into the snow white perfection of blankets to stain it with the filth of the cellar; black tar clinging to his skin, to his long matted hair, his eyes flickering to the grandeur of the knights and their teal-cloaks, their yellow-cloaks, Akaashi’s shimmering silver and Ukai’s midnight black.   
Even Kuroo and Bokuto are something to marvel at in casual armour—smooth leather skin wrapped over their shoulders and arms—and Tsukishima feels inferior in their presence, not just because he is omega, but because he is nobody.   
Not even useful; unable to repay them for his rescue. 

The silence draws in once more, heavy as mountains, as deep as the oceans; broken when Ukai repeats himself and Tsukki is struck by a whip of fear for having ignored the Alpha.   
But the reasons behind _his_ actions were known to him and him alone: Tsukki’s only thoughts of the man to be hatred and bone-deep fear that petrified him; his leash still around Tsukki’s throat like a weight he can’t shift and there’s anger there—bramble-thorns and papercut-pain—because neither he nor his daughter are in that cell anymore and yet he still feels as if he is in the man’s grasp; has been, all this time, for no other reason than that he could.

“As far as we know, he kept Omegas to make a profit.” 

The words come sharp and blunt, and had Tsukishima the mind to remember that he speaks to a room of Alphas and Betas, he might soften his tone and bow his head a little deeper, but there is an anger building like fire in his chest and he cannot hold everything in broken-finger hands; clutching at smoke, at sand, at water that drains away as the fire burns hotter.  
He can feel the restlessness inside him growing stronger too; the cloak too near the flames, the bed no longer soft; the air thick and hot; the want to hold Yachi tight in his arms like a coiling serpent in his gut, and yet he wants her far away from this.   
He wants to be with her, far away from this. 

“We were lucky when someone rich would come. If we were chosen, then we would be allowed upstairs, to wash, to look presentable,” he says staring at his hands but seeing countless faces twisted in sneer and their own taken pleasure, disgust like bile in the back of his throat, nails unconsciously scraping at his skin where he can still feel their too-tight grasp bruising his skin; Tsukishima caught in a thousand memories at once that he is blind to the tempest of scents that spill into the room—anger-pain-fear taking precedence in everything but his voice that stands detached as he speaks without thought. “We were tools; to be thrown away when we were broken.” 

Around him, rage flares like a wildfire; the scents of snarls of crowding Alphas crashing like the waves of a tempest at sea: Kuroo battling his own emotions, fingers digging deep into his thighs to ground himself into pain in attempts to hold silence; Bokuto beside him, mirroring the stone-sharp of his body held in tension—as much the mountain as he is the earthquake that shakes it—his pain not just worn on his face, but felt in his heart and flooding his scent as he turns to the memories of the cellar and the filth in which he had found this boy—the horrors he had to endure.   
Akaashi stands between them, a flicker of darkness in the depths of his unreadable expression, a hand each laid upon the shoulder of the men either side of him; holding them as much as he holds himself together in a near-perfect façade of calm. 

Hanamaki is not nearly so graceful; letting loose a string of curses, turning away from the congregation to stand next to the window, back turned to the pain Tsukishima speaks of; the second taking a half step to place himself between the two omegas, as if Tsukishima is a threat to him: Orio stepping in front of the omegan knight behind her in the same instant, Daichi reaching out to hold onto Suga as Suga reaches out to Tsukki. 

He jumps, suddenly, at the hand on his, eyes snapping to it and the touch of velvet-clouds, the callouses stretched across Suga’s palms from years of having held a sword, or staff, or whatever weapon he preferred, mind blank, but full, twisted and torn with nothing and everything all at once. He simply stares at the hand, at the way Suga tightens his grip imperceptibly as Ukai and Nekomata take charge in calming the others, concern expressed for Hanamaki and Terushima—the yellow-cloak—but neither of them chooses to leave.   
Neither does Bokuto, although he takes a tight grasp of Akaashi’s wrist and closes his eyes, face scrunched in pain to hide from an imagination that spins agony from the threads Tsukishima shares and that which he had already seen; Mari, like a ghost, haunting the shadows of his mind and Tsukki’s alike, sat beside him in Suga’s skin with that same honey-warm smile pushing through the pain of another day in the darkness. 

There are glances exchanged between all of them; unspoken words shared between Ukai and Nekomata with a sombre silence amidst the clamouring of emotion, and a part of Tsukki wonders what they know that he doesn’t; did they know the real reason he was kept like an animal in a cage, being bed each day, each night; years with a collar around his neck and his legs open to await the rutting Alphas, all because someone decided he was less than human? 

“Do you know how long were you held?” Ukai asks, tucking away whatever thoughts clouded his mind behind a perfectly sculpted mask, pushing through the smog, pulling back what of Tsukki’s fractured mind he could reach so that they could return to the informal interrogation.   
“Held?”   
“How long were you held captive?” he tries, voice immeasurably soft, just as Akaashi had spoken to him, back in the cell, when he had hidden his disgust and pity and everything unneeded in order to focus on the important things, like now, urging Tsukki to answer.   
But he doesn’t know. 

“Where were you taken from?” 

Tsukki doesn’t understand the question. He feels guilt and worry knotting in his chest, beneath the cloaked scent of indifference, because they expect him to answer; they have taken him from the cellar because they thought that he knew something; that Ukai and the others are calm now, but Tsukishima fears how long the Alpha’s patient façade will last if he cannot give the man the answers he seeks. 

And yet, Ukai does not grow angry, but rather in mournful sympathy; winter-sky-grey, sharp-stone-pain and the endless labyrinth-dark sadness that Tsukishima gets lost in, mind spinning, stomach churning, nails pinching flesh as Suga gives his hand a squeeze.   
He doesn’t understand why they conceal their anger, or better yet, why there is no anger at all. It confuses him. Worries him.   
Tsukishima understands the threat of a fist; knows the pain will fade before the bruise will. He understands the threat of a knife; that the blood will dry and the cut will sting, that too deep will sever the puppet-strings of his soul and the price of pain will be the final payment for eternal freedom among the stars. 

But kindness is a trap with hidden malice; a monster that hides its fangs behind a smile and Tsukishima doesn’t know the rules of the game he is playing. He isn’t to know what will follow or how long their pretend will last and it unnerves him more than their number or the lingering whip-sharp of anger that haunts Hanamaki like nameless ghosts.

Something changes—whatever the reason, Tsukki cannot say—but he feels it like a shift in the air, the colour of Ukai’s scent paling from summer-wheat to moonless-grey. 

“Do you… not remember?”   
“I don’t… I don’t know what you’re asking me,” Tsukki says, words caught in his throat, voice quiet in the growing silence, in fear to break it, “I don’t know what it is that you want to hear.”   
Suga gives his hand a squeeze, but it’s muted, distant almost; the touch belonging to his physical body and Tsukishima detached from it; set to drift on an ocean of nothingness as his mind billows with a thousand incoherent thoughts, his mind full and empty in the same instant; deformed fingers curling into the fashioned cloak of worry-confusion-fear in hopes that it would smother the heartbreak growing in his heart, because he is useless and soon they will see.   
Soon they will understand he would be better off dead. 

“What do you remember from before being in that cellar?” 

Before the cellar doesn’t sound right, but now that Ukai has put the words inside Tsukki’s head, now that he’s come to think about it, he realises that there must’ve been a before – he knows that he hadn’t spent his entire life in that grungy cell of cold stone bricks and rotten straw because he remembers the confusion of waking up in the darkness, he remembers screaming, hearing his own echo scream back at him and the thundering of footsteps, the meaty smack of fists when they beat him; the older Omega in the cell opposite hushing him as he lay bleeding.   
There had been a time when he woke up every day, and had scratched at the walls and shaken the door and cursed the Alphas that descended into the darkness to punish him for trying to escape, because he had been trying to escape, because he had been trying to return… _where? To whom?_

There’s a blank darkness where the answer should be; a looming of nothingness as dark as a starless sky, a name on his lips that isn’t Tadashi or Mari or familiar in anyway; Tsukki blinking unseeing as he chases answers that don’t come to him. 

Suga gives his hand another gentle squeeze—still gentle, and yet his touch is stronger; Tsukishima not so detached from his own body as before—head turning when Suga says that they can slow down, “if it’s too much, just tell us and we can take a break—”  
“No, it’s fine,” Tsukki says, surprising even himself when he means it, realises it, because he is fine. This breathlessness is nothing to him; the memories just a fact of life he can’t change and can only hope to forget with time. He had thought talking about the past would be far more difficult, but it’s not—still hard, in some regards—but Tsukki had thought talking would make him feel like he was suffocating; that he would struggle to get the words to come out of his mouth; that they would sit on his tongue and swell until it felt like he couldn’t breathe. 

Maybe Suga had spoken the truth.   
Maybe he really was safe here. 

Ukai asks Tsukki if he had been born in the cellar. No, he wasn’t, because they were never allowed to go outside—never allowed outside unless to bed a wealthy patron—and yet Tsukki already knew that the sky looked like. He knew what it was like to feel grass under his feet, what the wind felt like when she ran her fingers through his hair but he can’t remember anything other than the cellar, telling them as much; that when he tries to think about it, there’s half a thought, but he can’t see what his mind can, and he _can’t quite remember._

“But you know your name?”   
“Yes. My name is Tsukishima Kei.” 

It is only his name, only two words that give Tsukki an identity more than Omega and slave and thrall, and yet there is a ripple of shock, electric-sharp and stone-sure as the knights of Mokin-Rui tense as if they had all been struck; Ukai and Daichi sat ramrod straight; Akaashi’s nails biting into the grips he holds of the Alphas beside him; Bokuto and Kuroo’s expression piercing as Suga’s hand tightens enough to hurt.   
But he doesn’t wince, doesn’t reveal a moment of weakness, simply turning to the omega and asking what he did wrong; cloak pulled securely over the sudden swell of panic from their reactions, not understanding what it is that he had done wrong, because Kuroo’s first question to him in the cellar was for his name, and that Suga had asked for much the same when he had woken, so why is their reaction so stricken; why does his name invoke such pain and anger and—

“It’s okay, it’s just a little hard for us to hear this, just as you must find difficulty in speaking,” the silver-omega says, his smile genuine and velvet, but he shares twin looks with Daichi and the Guildmasters alike and Tsukki cannot help the fear that freezes the air in his chest, the lie so obvious in Suga’s voice that all thought of safety flees him.   
The edges of his cloaked disguise begins to fray; the rotten-meat, the burning on ash on his tongue, the graze of bleeding skin, rust beneath his fingers nails, but there is a weakness he will not commit to the light when he doesn’t understand what is the truth—whether he truly is safe, that his daughter is safe, that they are free—

“Do you know if you and the other Omegas were the only ones that _he_ had, or did you ever hear of another town, or anywhere else he might’ve kept other prisoners?” Daichi asks, returning their attention to the countless questions that still needed to be asked, eyes turning to him, to Tsukishima; scents cloying in unspoken emotion that confuses as much as it hurts; Tsukki burying himself in his own to hide from that which he cannot bear.   
There were no other places; Tsukki having heard _that man_ complain enough about the distance he would have to travel when he was summoned to the court, but there had been more omegas, but they were gone now. 

“Gone? Gone where?”   
“To whoever bought a broken omega. If not, they were killed and thrown away,” Tsukki says, shifting his shoulders, the motion just shy of a shrug, eyes falling once again to his hands; to eldritch fingers, broken and twisted and pallor; to the hand held by Suga’s and the rough callouses of his palm and the unwashable filth staining Tsukki’s skin, unseen by everyone expect himself.  
If the knights had not come to Magma Styr then that would’ve been his fate too, after he was no longer deemed desired by drunken Alphas and Betas alike; cast to the grave to be forgotten, but free; to reunite with Tadashi who had gone on ahead, his cell filled with another and the cycle set to continue just as sure as the sun will rise and fall, the moon to follow and another day to see them chase one another all over again. 

“That is the way it is,” he says, staring, unseeing, unfeeling of the words that fountain forth, because it had become a fact of life, “that if we disobeyed or spoke out one too many times, there would always be another omega to replace us, or if you were no longer the cost of food then you were thrown away.”  
“But you were pregnant,” the teal-cloak says, confused almost, “wouldn’t that make you…”   
“Undesirable?” Tsukki can’t help the bitter laughter breaking like untuned notes. “There were those that liked that sort of thing.” 

He held himself, pulling his hand from Suga’s as he curls his legs tighter to himself in effort to shield his stomach on habit, even though Yachi has been born and that she’s safe, with Kiyoko, sleeping or nursing, far from here—

“You mean, you still had too…” 

Tsukki lifts his head— _when had he dropped it?_ —uncurls his hands— _when had clenched them tight enough for his nails to break skin—_ and stares at Terushima, feeling confused, because wasn’t it obvious when he was nothing by omega; that Terushima was omega too, he should know where they stand on the food chain; that they are nothing but a stain upon society, to be used as a slave, bound to whatever Alpha bleeds him in their claiming bite—

The lurid in the bitter yellow of his cloak is the crack of a whip; the spark of the fire beneath Tsukki’s burnt feet, fear setting fire to his façade, scent unravelling at the sight of Fukutsu’s colours and the terror that Terushima is here to murder him, just like his guild brothers had murdered the omegas in the cellar!  
It’s just another reason for fear—another jump to conclusion that Suga and Kuroo assure him isn’t the case, that Terushima and Orio are both here representing Jozenji. 

“Jozenji? Not Fukutsu?” 

Somehow, the name is familiar to him, but he’s not sure where he has heard it before – if it’s a King’s Guild like Mokin-Rui and Nekoma and Fukutsu, then he must’ve heard it before, because they used to talk about the knights all the time, out in the garden, and— _who? Where?_

Nekomata calls Tsukki’s attention back from whatever labyrinth of thoughts had lured him in, with the chance of remembering something important; the shift in the room palpable like a chill against Tsukishima’s skin when he lifts his eyes from rust-stained sheets.   
Even though he is swathed in clean clothes, the blankets tucked in around his legs and the windows closed to bar the evening breeze, the room feels cold, the colours muted and dull, fading to monochrome as the world draws a breath and holds it. There’s a weight against his chest; a noose around his throat, but this is all they have asked of him so far and Tsukishima has no other way to repay them for giving him a glimpse of the sun; for taking his daughter from the reaching clutches of those that would bury her in a life that a death sentence would be more welcome than the dawn.   
He nods his silence towards Nekoma’s Guildmaster, willing to continue.

And wishes he hadn’t when the man opens his mouth and asks Tsukki if Donyuko was the one to sire Yachi. 

Just the thought alone makes the omega want to retch. 

His disgust spills out of him like vomit; curses and vile hatred black like tar as it drips from his chin; tongue sharp and lashing as he condemns that _monster_ to be forgotten, burnt in fire and banished from memory, knowing not even the deepest grave would be punishment enough, nor the earth deserving of such filth to rot in it.   
Anger pours out of his mouth like molten steel, a snowstorm building in the void of his mind as Donyuko’s cruel laughter haunts him, even now, even if the man had never touched him like that, but set a thousand Alphas on him like they were rabid dogs and Tsukki was a piece of meat to be torn apart. 

“No, _no,_ never, fucking— _never,_ ” Tsukki cursed, nails scraping at pale skin as if he could feel hands on him and—there are, hands, Alpha and Beta alike, but they’re not the patrons, mindless in drinks grasp, but Bokuto’s hands like velvet glass, Daichi and Akaashi pulling blunted nails from blood trails as Suga speaks, pushing through the trembling of his voice to reach for the boy wrapped deep in pain. 

Nekomata is apologising; the hum of his words like a bee’s nest beneath the surge of panic; other voices lilting, rising, falling like waves as Tsukishima is pulled back to shore, those around him leading him to safety away from the tempest storm that rages in the depths of his mind and there’s something telling about the way Tsukki doesn’t immediately shake their touch; leaning immeasurably into the way Bokuto rubs his hand, open palm, up and down his arm; the way Akaashi threads his fingers between the omegas, not holding, but being held; Daichi’s turned-earth, oakwood scent like dawn and morning light as Suga calls Tsukki’s name, words simple and easy and repeating as the torrent of rage passes and Tsukishima wakes to the late evening, tucked into a bed in Mokin-Rui’s infirmary, surrounded by Guild Knights. 

“I am sorry, that was careless of me,” Nekomata says, repeating himself. “I only asked because the reports given to me by my Knights said that only omegas were found,” he says, head bowed, scent flooded with regret and guilt and pain too similar to Tsukki’s own colour. He turns away from it; finds Daichi’s earthen-warmth, Akaashi’s mask of silver-lacquer separation and fashions himself a fur coat; wolf-skinned and cautioning, no longer Omega thrall but something changed and hidden so that he might bear a moment of pain more. 

“He never touched any of us,” Tsukki whispered, hating how frail he sounds, even in anger.   
But he understands why Nekomata asked what he had: because Omega males are able to sire children with an Alpha mate, and while rare it is not unheard of. Nekomata’s question taken seed from their knowledge with Donyuko to be the reigning Alpha, meaning that it would make sense for him to claim the Omegas as his possessions, even if he continued to use them for profit.   
Tsukki, and all the others, were fortunate that Donyuko didn’t adhere to the standard Alpha instincts. They weren’t so much as omegas, but tools; objects of desire or hatred or frustration be it in a lay or the lay of fists into flesh that would leave them blood and bruised and sometimes broken. 

Tsukki shakes his head, shedding tears like hot wax, and speaks a name he has not uttered in what feels an age. 

“An Alpha by the name of Yamaguchi Tadashi is Yachi’s father.” 

It hurts to say his name; not the same rage-filled pain that cracks like a whip, electricity under his skin and smoke in his lungs; but a bone-deep, heartbreakingly fragile pain as old as the earth and deep as the night sky; tears shed in his name as infinite as the stars themselves. 

“Tadashi was his only captive Alpha.” 

They’re surprised to hear this. Tsukki feels it in the shift of the air, eyes staring at his hands and nowhere else as he pulls them from Suga’s grasp, from Akaashi’s touch, fingertips tracing bloodline over his wrist, to the bony wrists that look misshapen and deformed, to the faint crescent of teeth marks that scar him with a non-binding bite; the only memento of Tadashi that Tsukki will never lose beyond that of his daughter.   
He wants to be able to talk about him as easily as he can his confinement, but Tadashi’s name holds a precious weight and the pain isn’t the cut of a knife or the solid of a fist, but a weight on his shoulders and his back and his chest, and it feels like he can’t take a full breath; like he hasn’t been able to breathe properly since Tadashi took his last. 

“I’m sorry, I know this must be hard for you—harder than any of us could ever hope to imagine—” Ukai says, and there’s a genuinity in his voice that pushes past the pain and finds that scared boy, cradling himself in the dark of the cellar, “and if you don’t want to talk anymore, then we can—”  
“Tadashi wasn’t like the rest of them,” Tsukki says, speaking as if he hadn’t heard the Guildmaster speak, forcing out the words even as tears pour free and fast and with the bite of acid. “He was soft spoken and he was weak compared to the Alphas that held us. But he was kind and he tried to help everyone, even when he was in so much pain,” he sniffs, pressing on when Suga shushes him and Akaashi makes to speak. 

“Tadashi was treated just like the rest of us—but no, it was so much worse for him, because being taken by others was against his nature, while we omegas were born to be bred,” and there’s anger, so obvious in his words, but they are spoken—not free, not easily, but spoken and Tsukishima won’t readily hold back when he peels back the bandage to find the wound festered and rotten and a hole where his heart used to be. 

“Tadashi would’ve been my mate. He was my pair, and if it wasn’t for the collars around our _fucking_ necks—”

“He wasn’t there when we found you.”   
Tsukishima lifts his eyes from the stains of blood to the deep sadness Kuroo holds in his eyes; to the similar hue of pain, as if Kuroo knows the name of the ghost that haunts him; knows the name because he is haunted too.

“No, he wasn’t there.”

Each breath is rattled.   
Each word is empty. 

“ _He_ got mad one night. Mad or drunk. He’d never touch us like the others would, he’d wouldn’t even spit on us were we burning, but sometimes he and his friends would drink and gamble and he’d lose or he’d be drunk and he’d wager one of us to settle his debts. One night, it was my turn to pay his price. 

“Tadashi never fought them, never said a word to them, just took his punishment and put on a smile for all our sakes. But this night was different,” Tsukki says, quiet, voice barely a whisper and yet crystal clear in the silence of the room.   
“He fought them. He was like animal, like a man possessed by a beast, as if he had allowed his instinct to consume him and he threw himself at them when they came for me. He was _protecting_ me,” Tsukki chokes, hands on his face, palming at the tears that blur his vision, burning with hatred to _him,_ and to himself, because Tadashi had fought for his sake.   
And died because of it. 

“They killed him. Right there, in my cell. I held him, as they laughed, and when he died, they dragged him out like pig for the butcher. It was only afterwards that I found out I was pregnant again. Tadashi never knew.”

Everything is too much to bear all at once; all his anger and hate and heartbreak like iron around his chest that won’t allow him to breath, Tsukki turning forcibly in his mind so that he is monochrome, his voice monochrome and empty even when he speaks of his pair so cruelly murdered, leaving him without half a heart and empty hope growing in his stomach. 

“A-again?”

Tsukki turns to Suga beside him, to his cherry-petal sweetness, sugar-smile marred by the horror of nightmares, and beneath the mindlessness he had set himself adrift in, he feels discomfort pricking at his skin, because he doesn’t like to see the kind-hearted silver twisted in sympathetic pain; reaching out to close the divide he keeps breaking, squeezing his hand and smiling at him, because, truly, it’s not so bad.   
He is omega, after all. It is simply the natural order. 

Tsukki turns back to Ukai and Nekomata, ignoring the mirrored pain the knights share, because, truly, it’s not so bad. “I wasn’t the first omega to get pregnant. Yachi is not even my first child, but she is the first to have survived.”   
“The first?” There’s something deeper than shock in Kuroo’s voice, but the display of anger in clenched fists and sharp lines of his body don’t equate to it either. 

“Any child born in that cellar was taken from their mother at birth. They were sold, alongside the broken omegas if they didn’t die from childbirth or the heavier-handed patrons.”

It would be hard news for anyone to accept; their reactions bitter-ice in pain, molten-acid in rage that sees Bokuto rising from his chair, hand on his hip in an instant as if willing to race back to Magma Styr and cut every last one of them down all over again; Akaashi, Kuroo and Nekomata set to calm him even when they shake with their own electric emotions.   
Suga’s grip is like a vice on Tsukki’s hand, but he lets the omega take what he needs, listening to Daichi’s voice rise, from acorn to oak; beyond the hurried whispering of Matsukawa grounding Hanamaki before his own outrage can catch like a spark and set the world ablaze. 

Tsukishima would feel guilty if he could feel at all, because this is severe news to them and perhaps, he shouldn’t have been so blasé about children’s lives. But for him, he had to quickly come to accept the death of those born – that he was the lucky to have lost all but two of his children before their time came.   
Luckier still, that all of his children were sired by Tadashi.   
Blessed to have Yachi still. 

The knight’s horror devolves into arguing; Nekomata, caught up in anger to not realise his mask slipping as he hisses, “because what Donyuko has done is unforgiveable,” and Orio, right there beside him, “that yes it sounds despicable but there is no proof to the claim—” Terushima interrupting her because “that’s madness, did you not hear what he just said?”  
“And why are you so quick to believe him?” She spits, turning on the omega with acid, Tsukki’s anger whip sharp and ready, “it is Donyuko who he is incriminating—”  
“You weren’t there!” Terushima snarled at her—actually snarled—“you didn’t see the cellar where he was being kept, all of them chained up like they were animals, being bred for their children,” his anger visceral and sharp and coloured with grey-blue-winter-pain, because he is omega too and that could’ve been him in one of those cells, right alongside Mari, alongside Tsukki, alongside Hanamaki.   
Matsukawa has a tight grip on the teal-cloak as he leans closer and closer to the window, open now, but the growing cold of the night can’t empty the room of the potent rage that poisons it, but clouded, at least as Daichi and Kuroo and Ukai release their pheromones to calm; Suga slow to join in where he wears horror like the colour of his skin, the hand that isn’t clutching Tsukki’s hand curled over his stomach. Maybe he… 

But before the thought can go any further, Tsukki’s attention is caught by Nekomata’s words, having turned from Orio and Terushima’s argument to Ukai, saying that “what Tsukishima has said so far matches up with the reports from Nekoma’s findings of the bodies; that near enough all of them had been pregnant in the recent months, that all of them are showing trauma in accordance to past, and terminated pregnancies.   
“But how can all of the children die?” Kuroo asks, leaning closer so that he needn’t raise his voice too loud. “If Donyuko was using the omegas to breed them, then he would take better care of the mothers to ensure a healthy birth, even if he wanted to continue using them to turn a profit.” 

Tsukki wonders what Kuroo means about them being bred – that all he knew was that he was sold, night after night for an Alpha’s gold coin; that the children were by-products and, if they survived childbirth, then they amounted to another object Donyuko could sell to whoever wanted a newborn.   
It’s almost like the words don’t make sense to him as he listens to the three of them, because “in that cellar, and with the condition of the bodies we found, there would be all manner of reasons; illness, malnutrition, complications during birth that would risk the baby’s health—”

The laughter was unexpected. 

Tsukki can’t help it. He tries to stifle the noise behind a hand, only half aware of the way everyone snaps their attention back to him and the sick, humourless laughter that rises from him like toxic smoke and he can’t help the lightness in his words.   
“I wish it was that simple,” he says, smiles, even when his mind is assaulted with the memory of months ago, when he and another male omega had been called upstairs to tend to one of the girls. She had been beaten badly by the Beta that had bought her; the abuse triggering her to lose her child that same night, and how, _how had Tsukki not realised,_ because _he_ had been furious, but Tsukki had thought it was because the girl wouldn’t be able to accept patrons for a while, not that she had lost the baby, although, he had considered that too because she was a month from handing him a bonus profit. 

Tsukki cannot help his laughter. “I suffered for years, right there, under his feet, and I didn’t even realise I was going on. He didn’t take us because of our worthlessness as omegas, but the fact that we _were_ omegas, that we were able to get pregnant,” and it’s not funny, not in the slightest, but it’s either laugh or scream and Tsukishima has screamed himself hoarse for years. He palms at the rain that pours from his eyes and continues laughing.   
“It wasn’t about the Alphas; it was about the children we could give him. The children he took from us.” 

He can’t—he can’t breathe properly. There’s something in his lungs, something cloying his throat. 

“He took my son from me. I didn’t give him my son; he _took him_ from me,” he says, nails burying into flesh, eyes wide and wild as he stares at Ukai: the man with all the questions, who promised he would answer questions of his own— “where did he take my son? Where is my son, where is Donyuko, _he has my son!”_

Beside him, he can feel another ocean of anger; Bokuto tethered between Akaashi and Kuroo alike, pain the colour of his scent. All of them share his emotion—the alphas, sympathetic; the omegas, fearful—but it is Bokuto who feels it like he has stood right beside Tsukishima through his nightmares; held his hand and weathered the storm where there is no shelter than that of their skin, their bone; body sacrificed so that their soul might fly to worlds unknown when they greet their final dawn.   
It is an odd comfort, because the emotion, the scent of enduring pain reminds Tsukishima of the cellar. Things were so much easier in the darkness, and while Tsukki would never, _never_ wish to return, he cannot help but acknowledge that leaving has left him with a thousand questions.   
Up here, in the light, he doesn’t know what will happen to him. He doesn’t know what will happen to Yachi, whereas in the cellar he knew what to expect; he knew the level of pain he would feel from an Alpha’s fist, he knew how to calm them, how to entice them; how to read an Alpha by more than his scent; to know what it is that he wanted and how to meet that want. 

Up here, Tsukki doesn’t know what will happen and he doesn’t want to admit it, but it scares him. 

Tsukki can hear the subtle whispering of Akaashi’s warning, his silver-thread scent weaving through the edges of Bokuto’s own, easing him back from the precipice and realises he’s about to lose the anger.   
He needs it, more than his own pain, more than the heartbreak; remembering how it had been back in the cellar, trying to remember what had triggered Bokuto’s reaction as he carves and gouges at his own soul to mirror the stone-cold-grey, the desolate of endless plains, broken bones and spilt blood, shattered sunrises and stolen sunsets; exhaustion-fear-terror-agony, staccato breaths that Tsukki takes and wraps around himself, burying himself in the familiar intensity of Bokuto’s emotions because it’s better than fear, it’s better than confusion, it’s better than trying to ask questions he isn’t strong enough to hear the answers to. 

Tsukki throws himself into the dwindling anger, the sudden chilling horror, and lets his mind vanish into a blizzard of white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **[CONTENT WARNING:** This chapter contains **Mentions of Previous Miscarriages, Mentions of Past Rape, Trauma, PTSD, Disassociation, Derealisation, Slavery,** and **Human Trafficking.]**  
>  Tsukishima recalls his past years of abuse in confinement to the Guild Knights.

**Author's Note:**

> Since completing some major stories in other Fandoms I have more free time and motivation for this story, so look forward to more frequent updates.


End file.
